Ira Glass

“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.”

“A lot of broadcasting, I think, is doing a tremendous amount of preparation and trying to act like, 'Oh, this thought is just occurring to me right now' - and speaking sincerely.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I'm in production year round. I work long hours. I have a dog and a wife. There's not a lot of available time for consuming any culture: T.V., movies, books. When I read, it's generally magazines, newspapers and web sites.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was a freelancer all through my 20s and was very slow to get good at what I did.”

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

“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.”

“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.”