Ira Glass Quotes

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Ira Glass

Profession : Journalist

Birth : March 3, 1959

Any story that I can consider worth telling is one that you could tell in words.

Ira Glass

You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It's just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you're saying is actually planned out.

Ira Glass

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

Ira Glass

I feel like dance, by its nature, goes so easily to grand and beautiful.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

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

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

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

Generally the aesthetics of broadcast journalism seem to me to be incredibly primitive.

Ira Glass

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.

Ira Glass

If you date one woman a year, times 10 years, and that's 10 women.

Ira Glass

Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that's what our whole country is based on. It's amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he's basically just protein.

Ira Glass