Ira Glass

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

“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.”

“In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.”

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

“'Smallville' is like a Domino's pizza. While you're eating, you're thinking, 'This is good, and it reminds me of pizza, but there's not enough flavor in each bite.' That's the feeling you have the entire time with 'Smallville' - that it's just about to be good, but it never is.”

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

“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.”

“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 Flash could do everything twice as fast. Except you never saw him think twice as fast or speak twice as fast. Could he do math faster than the other superheroes? Could he compute the tip for the bill twice as fast?”

“For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person, and things happen to them, and then something big happens, and they realize something new.”

“I have a pit bull. He's a rescue. He's adorable.”

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

“I like excess. And giant M&M's.”

“I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller.”

“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.”

“Radio is for driving.”

“I'm a cliche.”

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

“I'll meet listeners who tell me what a great voice I have. But I don't have a great voice for radio. My voice is the utterly normal voice, but sheer repetition has made them think it's OK. Mick Jagger once was asked, 'What makes a hit song? He said, 'Repetition.'”

“I've actually done events at radio stations where I feel like I've had to give a little talk in behalf of television as a medium.”