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" 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. "

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" I feel like in an interview situation, it's a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle - versus in real life, when I'm much more of a bumbler and have a hard time. "

Ira Glass

Feel

Understand

Time

" 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. "

Ira Glass

People

Distance

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations. "

" I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write. "

" 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. "

" 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

News

Media

" I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day. "

" Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question. "

" In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Ira Glass

Twitter

Think

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Ira Glass

Jokes

School

" I don't take care of my voice at all, which is one reason that I sound as bad as I do. "

" I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say. "

" In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm just not very funny. "

" 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

Long Time

Long