Ira Glass Quotes

“You'll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.”

— Ira Glass

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity ... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will ...

— Ira Glass

“Great stories happen to those who can tell them”

— Ira Glass

“Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.”

— Ira Glass

“I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid - or I was - I don't think I've ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids' parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.”

— Ira Glass

“Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he's chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione - she's working harder than anyone, she's half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn't be there at all. It's so unfair that Harry's the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.”

— Ira Glass

“Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it.”

— Ira Glass

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

— Ira Glass

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

— Ira Glass

“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.”

— Ira Glass

“But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.”

— Ira Glass

“If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you're telling them a story.”

— Ira Glass

I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.

— Ira Glass

“It's tricky, performing the show live. Because when you're in a big auditorium, in front of 700 people, the natural tendency is to want to talk louder. You want to project.”

— Ira Glass

You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

— Ira Glass

“Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.”

— Ira Glass

“It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.”

— Ira Glass

“Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I can't even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.”

— Ira Glass

“I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.”

— Ira Glass

“I don't meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.”

— Ira Glass

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

— Ira Glass

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

— Ira Glass

I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.

— Ira Glass

“I was a freelancer all through my 20s and was very slow to get good at what I did.”

— Ira Glass

“I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.”

— Ira Glass

“I've never so appreciated what actors do and how strange it is.”

— Ira Glass

If you date one woman a year, times 10 years, and that's 10 women.

— Ira Glass

“In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.”

— Ira Glass

Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.

— Ira Glass

“We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.”

— Ira Glass

“When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.”

— Ira Glass

When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise.

— Ira Glass

“I don't own a radio. I listen to everything through apps or on my iPhone. And then I download the shows I like. Shows like 'Fresh Air', 'Radiolab', 'Snap Judgement', all those shows.”

— Ira Glass

I didn't watch T.V. from the time I was 18 'til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch 'The Sopranos.' I realized, 'Oh, T.V. is really interesting.'

— Ira Glass

“I don't tweet because I don't need another creative venue. I don't need another form for self-expression. I don't need another way to get my thoughts out to people. I have one. I'm good.”

— Ira Glass

“I started out doing production work on promos, stuff like that. I didn't think it was cool to be working for NPR. I didn't need anything to be cool. I just wanted something to do that would be interesting. It was fun. I didn't think of it as anything else but fun.”

— Ira Glass

“I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.”

— Ira Glass

“I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.”

— Ira Glass

I'll meet listeners who tell me what a great voice I have. But I don't have a great voice for radio. My voice is the utterly normal voice, but sheer repetition has made them think it's OK. Mick Jagger once was asked, 'What makes a hit song? He said, 'Repetition.'

— Ira Glass

“I'm a reporter - if I don't interview someone, I don't have much to say, and I definitely can't just sit down and knock out 800 words on any subject you give me.”

— Ira Glass

It took, for me, a long time to develop this idea of what to do on the radio. But from the beginning of my time in radio, I had pretty non-traditional tasks.

— Ira Glass

“Not owning a car anymore, I feel like I'm barely an American. I miss it. And I barely ever get to listen to the radio in the car, which is the best place for radio.”

— Ira Glass

“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.”

— Ira Glass

“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?”

— Ira Glass

“There is a kind of structure for a story that was peculiarly compelling for the radio. I thought I had invented it atom-by-atom sitting in an editing booth in Washington on M Street when I was in my 20s. Then I found out that it is one of the oldest forms of telling a story - it was the structure of a sermon.”

— Ira Glass

You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It's just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you're saying is actually planned out.

— Ira Glass

You just have to fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

— Ira Glass

“Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.”

— Ira Glass

“Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.”

— Ira Glass