Ira Glass Quotes

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Ira Glass

Profession : Journalist

Birth : March 3, 1959

I never realized before this the emotional power of some really simple, corny tropes: people with top hats, people with batons, confetti going off, how important it is to smile.

Ira Glass

People are generally forced to change. We don't want to change, and then something absolutely forces us to realize that what we are doing isn't working or that our picture of the world is wrong. We fail. So we change.

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

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.

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 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

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

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

Ira Glass

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

Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn't fun?

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.

Ira Glass

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

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

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

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.

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

One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.

Ira Glass

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