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" My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school. "

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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. "

Ira Glass

Story

You

Sound

" One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story. "

" Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best. "

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

" I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images. "

" 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. "

" The atheist market is a very overlooked and powerful market, it turns out. "

" 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. "

" Like, radio is closer to a Tumblr, or a blog, or Twitter, than it is to television, I think. "

Ira Glass

Twitter

Think

" 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. "

" I can only control what I can control. "

" The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side. "

" 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. "

" 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

Watch

Got

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

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

" There is a feeling, when you listen to radio, that it's one person, and they're talking to you, and you really feel their presence as one person. "

" 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. "

" The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true. "

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

" Starting in the 1970s, American cars started to lose market share to foreign cars. It was clear what was happening - these better-made foreign car companies were encroaching on the U.S., and the U.S. car makers had less than half of their own country's market. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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

Wrong

Great

" I like excess. And giant M&M's. "

Ira Glass

Excess

Giant