Ira Glass People Quotations

The pledge drive has everything going against it as broadcasting. It's repetitive. It's ad-libbed by people who can't ad-lib. It's about asking for money, which is something nobody wants to hear, even from their own relatives.

Radio is more powerful the closer we mimic the way we actually speak to each other. That's why Howard Stern is such a great radio talent. People on his show are actually speaking to each other. You might not like what they're saying, but they're real conversations.

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.

I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio. When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.

I remember that in Baltimore, where I grew up, we would drive by the radio station and tower of WBAL, and I would try to picture the people inside and what they did there.

Like most people in radio - and in magic - I'm not cool. I know people who are hip, and I can feel distance between them and me.

For people starting public radio shows, one of the things you have to do is you have to talk every single public radio station into picking you up.

But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.

One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.

I dont meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.

Nobody tells people who are beginners - and I really wish somebody had told this to me - that all of us who do creative work... get into it because we have good taste.

In some theoretical way I know that a half-million people hear the show. But in a day-to-day way, there's not much evidence of it.

When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.

I dont go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.

When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it.

It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.

I think people who live in New York don't realize just how much time they spend talking about the subway.

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.

I think stories get better the more people try to amuse themselves.

I liked the people at Brown, while I really disliked most of the fellow students I had met at Northwestern.

I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.

I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television.

People are generally forced to change. We don't want to change, and then something absolutely forces us to realize that what we are doing isn't working or that our picture of the world is wrong. We fail. So we change.

I never realized before this the emotional power of some really simple, corny tropes: people with top hats, people with batons, confetti going off, how important it is to smile.

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.