Ira Glass Quotes
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I don't think I've ever stolen anything.
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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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You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.
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But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
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One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.
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Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.
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Honestly, I don't see movies more than once.
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I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.
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I seen a pig so big it’d block out the sun.
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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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I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.
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I just feel like there's so many movies I haven't seen that I want to see, that I would never go back to the same one. It's funny because all my friends, they have movies that they've seen over and over again.
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What nobody tells people who are beginners… is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not… your taste is why your work disappoints you… We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this… It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
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The entire culture was organized for people who are happy. People who are miserable need reassurance that other people are miserable.
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Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.
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I was a chubby, unathletic kid and conformed to every possible stereotype you could imagine of someone who would end up in public broadcasting.
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I'm going to go with Chihuahua, just because I can't think of anything more frightening than a giant Chihuahua.
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You will be fierce. You will fearless. And you will make work you know in your heart is not as good as you want it to be.
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Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.
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I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people's faces.
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Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.
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I don't think I ever played any sports recreationally for my own pleasure. I was bad at them from the start.
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It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
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It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
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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.
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You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
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We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
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Nobody tells people who are beginners - and I really wish somebody had told this to me - that all of us who do creative work... get into it because we have good taste.
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I played no sports well. Because I was a boy in the United States Of America, I was forced into Little League and played horrible Little League baseball, and played football and basketball in school situations where I was forced to.
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I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. 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.
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