Ira Glass Quotes
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I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
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I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
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Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
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I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.
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We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
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Honestly, I find the analysis of dreams is one of the dullest things. I say this as a therapist kid. I find them deeply uninteresting, as a window to the soul.
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But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
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Reporters tend to find in others what they are suited to find, so there is a whole school of reporting where they are cynical about the world, and everything reinforces that. Whereas I tend to be optimistic and be amused by people and like them, even rather bad people.
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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.
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Harry Potter to me is a bore. His talent arrives as a gift; he's chosen. Who can identify with that? But Hermione - she's working harder than anyone, she's half outsider, right? Half Muggle. She shouldn't be there at all. It's so unfair that Harry's the star of the books, given how hard she worked to get her powers.
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I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.
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Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.
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Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?
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I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'
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I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.
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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.
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It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.
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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.
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I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio. When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.
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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.
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Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.
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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.
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There is a kind of structure for a story that was peculiarly compelling for the radio. I thought I had invented it atom-by-atom sitting in an editing booth in Washington on M Street when I was in my 20s. Then I found out that it is one of the oldest forms of telling a story - it was the structure of a sermon.
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'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.