Ira Glass Interested Quotations

I only got interested in radio once I talked my way into an internship at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1978, never having heard the network on the air.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

For most people when you say - public radio - they automatically think it's like medicine. We only do stories that amuse and interest us. For people who haven't heard the show, we describe it like a movie where there are characters and you're interested in what's going to happen to them.

Her vision of what the country is, and what she should be writing about, is totally her own. She's utterly in step with the current moment, ... She's in touch with contemporary culture and the things people in their 20s are interested in, but it's all informed with a level of attention and idealism about America as a place you would expect from somebody much older and tweedier.