If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get lucky.
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.
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.
Perfectionism: the need to be right instead of being right.
It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.
Force yourself through the work, force the skills to comes; that’s the hardest phase; I feel like your problem is that you’re trying to judge all things in abstract before you do them. That is your tragic mistake.