Quotes About Npr

“Instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?”

— Maria Dahvana Headley

“I was thinking in a Scottish brogue, because I'd just heard this guy interviewed on NPR, Lonnie McSomething.”

— Patricia Gaffney

“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard "redneck" on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying "redneck" the last time it would be said.”

— Padgett Powell

“She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point.
And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR.”

— Padgett Powell

“This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.”

— Jim Harrison

“I've enjoyed programming on NPR, but 'we're broke' and therefore all spending must be reduced.”

— Jaime Herrera Beutler

“And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.”

— Augusten Burroughs

“They wish the church could be more diverse, but then leave to meet in a coffee shop with other well-educated thirtysomethings who are into film festivals, NPR, and carbon offsets.”

— Kevin DeYoung

“So many people are not aware that NPR writes things, 'posts' things. But we are spreading the word.”

— Robert Krulwich

“What NPR did, I'm very proud of, and what NPR stood for is non-racist, non-bigoted, straightforward telling of the news.”

— Ron Schiller

“I'm also working on a track for Howard Hewett, and a theme for a new NPR show.”

— George Duke

“The voice I've chosen to turn to is that of NPR. With a reputation for some of the finest journalism in the country, the nonprofit organization is renowned for its unbiased stance - to the point that it's been accused of being both conservative and liberal.”

— Lynda Resnick

“When I got out of undergrad, I had a degree in theater and telecommunications. My first job, I was a news reporter for the local stories for NPR. Then I was a country-western DJ. I did data entry for a yearbook company. In my mid-20s I went back to grad school at NYU, and I specialized in playwriting.”

— Suzanne Collins

“There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly ... Back in the day Leo Tolstoy
what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer
in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. ("Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future", NPR interview, August 2, 2010)”

— Gary Shteyngart

“I have been an unabashed fan of NPR for many years, and have stolen untold excellent ideas from its programming.”

— Ted Koppel

“For me, the key is I always have to be the same person. If someone was to hear me say something on Fox and hear me say something different on NPR, they would say, 'The guy is a hypocrite.'”

— Juan Williams

“Even after they fired me, called me a bigot and publicly advised me to only share my thoughts with a psychiatrist, I did not call for defunding NPR. I am a journalist, and NPR is an important platform for journalism.”

— Juan Williams

“I'm kind of a 'Daily Show,' Bill Maher junkie. I listen to NPR and I still get the 'New York Times' paper delivered to my door, even though I live in L.A.”

— Constance Zimmer

“Politics aside, it will be hard for any new liberal radio network to outdo the professionalism of NPR.”

— Paul Weyrich

“There's no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'”

— Al Franken

“I listen to NPR when I listen to the radio, but I don't listen to the radio that much. You know, I listen to Garrison Keillor, I listen to 'Prairie Home Companion.'”

— Al Franken

“I listen to NPR a lot. I love that.”

— Nikki Sixx

“I would appear on Fox News more easily than I would NPR.”

— Noam Chomsky

“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

“When I was a bad writer, I would consciously imitate other NPR writers who I thought were wonderful. I suppose that everyone's artistic practice is different. But I collaborate and sometimes don't agree at all with my collaborators' opinions. It forces you to understand why you don't agree with something: what's the fight you're picking.”

— Ira Glass

“I was asked by an NPR reporter once why don't I talk about race that often. I said, 'It's because I'm a neurosurgeon.' And she thought that was a strange response ... I said, 'You see, when I take someone to the operating room, I'm actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn't make them who they are.'”

— Ben Carson

“Both CNN and NPR prohibit political activity by all journalists, no matter their assignment.”

— Bill Dedman

“If you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you had forgotten your pants.”

— Bill James

“It isn't that NPR is matriarchal but that it has dedicated itself to not being patriarchal in its outlook and presentation, stipulating from the outset that its headline voices would not resound across the fruited plains from big male bags of air sent from Mount Olympus.”

— James Wolcott

“NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims. This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fears after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by radical Muslims.”

— Juan Williams

“NPR editors and journalists found themselves caught in a game of trying to please a leadership team who did not want to hear stories on the air about conservatives, the poor, or anyone who didn't fit their profitable design of NPR as the official voice of college-educated, white, liberal-leaning, upper-income America.”

— Juan Williams

“Years ago, NPR tried to stop me from going on "The Factor." When I refused, they insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR journalist. I asked them if they thought people did not know where I appeared on the air as a daily talk show host, national correspondent and news analyst. They refused to budge.”

— Juan Williams

“I've always thought the Right-wing were ones that were inflexible and intolerant,and now I'm coming to realize that the orthodoxy at NPR, it's representing the Left.”

— Juan Williams

“I listen to a lot of podcasts, which are split down the middle between comedy and board game podcasts, and a couple of eclectic ones like 'The Dinner Party' from NPR, where they take an event that happened that week in history and give you a cocktail recipe inspired by it.”

— Rich Sommer

“I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.”

— Carrie Brownstein

“It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.”

— Carrie Brownstein

“As much as I'd like to think and as much as people mistakenly think my audience is blue collar people in the heart of America, my audience is basically, in the States, an NPR audience. I play college towns in the summer because that's who comes to see me.”

— Steve Earle

“When I'm alone, I work sometimes with music, sometimes without and sometimes just listening to NPR.”

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

“All it takes is for me to try and not think of Garrett, and suddenly, he's consuming my every idle musing. Picking a radio station? Garrett only listened to NPR. Browsing the refrigerator for orange juice? Garrett likes the pulp style best.”

— Abby McDonald

“Looking back on the event, I find myself thinking there are three approaches to journalism represented here. One is the "cool" approach of traditional journalism, including network broadcasting in which NPR is no exception. One is the "hot" approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV. The third is the engaged approach of weblogging.”

— David "Doc" Searls

“They [NPR] are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

— Roger Ailes

“We have some breaking news from our dedicated kale coverage desk here at NPR.Starting now, Chick-fil-A has kale on its menu next to the spicy chicken sandwich and the waffle fries. It's called the Superfood Side.”

— Ari Shapiro

“There are still many questions about how law enforcement responded to the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.To get some answers, media organizations, including NPR, have asked for tapes of the 911 calls and other recordings. So far, authorities have not released that audio, only edited transcripts. Doing more, they say, would re-victimize the survivors.”

— Audie Cornish

“'I haven't used the veto pen very often since I've been in office,' Obama told NPR. 'Now, I suspect there are going to be some times where I've got to pull that pen out. And I'm going to defend gains that we've made in healthcare; I'm going to defend gains that we've made on the environment and clean air and clean water.'”

— Byron York

“One of the problems with NPR is that there is so much political correctness that if you've got a name that looks like it was made up by Rudyard Kipling, you've got a better chance of getting hired. I'm a white guy named Tony Snow, for heaven's sake. That's as white as it goes.”

— Tony Snow

“We need to cut these things that aren't constitutionally mandated, that are kind of on the periphery, the fluffery, like NPR and National Endowment for the Arts. Those are obvious.”

— Sarah Palin

“Jesus Christ, is this an NPR convention?”

— Jack White

“I wrote "Win" for people on both sides, legitimately on both sides. If you're a Democrat listening to this right now, you - the whole playbook is in this book. If you're a Republican, and you're frustrated because Barack Obama is a great communicator, the playbook is in this book. And if you're a corporation who wants to satisfy his - their employees, how to do it is in this book. And finally, if you're an employee and you want to get a raise, whether at NPR or anyplace else, it's in this book.”

— Frank Luntz

“The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again - without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.”

— Julianna Baggott

“Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical - and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.”

— Charles Krauthammer