Ira Glass Quotations | Page 2

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.

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.

I've read the poker books, but at this point, everybody who's playing has read the poker books. I feel like I'm knowledgeable enough to understand what's going on in the game, and I understand why I suck. And I'm not sure if I'll ever rise beyond that to the level where I don't suck.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

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.

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'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 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.

I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.

I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.