Terry Gross

“I think the interview form works best on the radio. There are a lot of personality traits conveyed in a person's voice, the rhythm of their speech or how confident they sound.”

“Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.”

“I'm not the betting kind.”

“I love songs. Songs are my favorite things.”

“I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have. Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them.”

“I work in a medium where I get to be totally invisible and I get great pleasure from that, being a pretty self-conscious person.”

“What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being found out.”

“I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.”

“Work can take on a new dimension if you know something about the artist.”

“Most people I know that have work that is very meaningful to them pay the price of having to work all the time.”

“I respect someone's right to privacy and I want them to know it.”

“Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private. But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.”

“It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.”

“I've never seen radio as the minor leagues, where I'm just really preparing to be in the show that really counts, namely, television, which is, I think, what people often assume. I've never felt that way.”

“I am literally smaller than life. I am an unextraordinary-looking person. I've seen people trying to hide their disappointment when they meet me, and I have to watch them get over it.”

“Often real life is boring and problematic. I love the edited version of it.”

“The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.”

“I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.”

“If you are interested in ideas, radio is way more pure than television. You're not distracted by somebody's nose or hair or posture. You can really see how someone thinks and penetrate to the essence of who that person is.”

“I've always been really curious about things and slightly confused by the world, and I think someone who feels that way is in a good position to be the one asking questions.”