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" 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
Good
Need
Creative
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" I feel like, in general in my work life, my main goal has been to just be in a situation where I'm not bored with my job. That's been the entire principle. Got my wish. "
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" 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. "
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" I like excess. And giant M&M's. "
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" 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. "
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" Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result. "
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" Any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot but in fact sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would. "
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" 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
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" I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller. "
Ira Glass
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" I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal. "
Ira Glass
Name
Work
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" I don't think I'm better than everyone else at anything, but I am very quick at organizing a big mass of interview tape into a structure. "
Ira Glass
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" I don't 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. "
Ira Glass
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" 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
Meet
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" I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college. "
Ira Glass
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Fiction
College
" 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
Kid
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" But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake. "
Ira Glass
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Great
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" 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. "
Ira Glass
Know
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" I'm a cliche. "
Ira Glass
Cliche
" Honestly, there are so many things about structuring a story for film and telling a story for film that are really different from doing radio. "
Ira Glass
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" I was a freelancer all through my 20s and was very slow to get good at what I did. "
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" Radio is for driving. "
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" 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
Movies
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" When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves. "
Ira Glass
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" 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. "
Ira Glass
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" Like, radio is closer to a Tumblr, or a blog, or Twitter, than it is to television, I think. "
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" The Flash could do everything twice as fast. Except you never saw him think twice as fast or speak twice as fast. Could he do math faster than the other superheroes? Could he compute the tip for the bill twice as fast? "
Ira Glass
Twice
Fast
Never
" 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. But a lot of effective and interesting radio is based on one character who reacts to the world. "
Ira Glass
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" Honestly, like, I'm a superfan of the 'New York Times,' but I know nothing about how they put it together, and I really don't care. "
Ira Glass
Know
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Nothing
" But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time. "
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" In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence. "
Ira Glass
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" The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world. "
Ira Glass
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