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.
I suppose I shouldn’t go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
Go looking for an idea and it’ll show up. Begin now.
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.
Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.
I wish that someone had said to me that it’s normal to feel lost for a little while.
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.
Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn’t fun?
Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.
I can only control what I can control.
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.’
Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I cant even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.
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.
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.
We’re Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
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.
If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get lucky.
You just want to try a bunch of stuff, because you don’t know what’s going to be great.
Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.
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.