Top 40 Ira Glass Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.”

— Ira Glass

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “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.”

— Ira Glass

3. “The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.”

— Ira Glass

4. “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.”

— Ira Glass

5. “I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be.”

— Ira Glass

6. “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.”

— Ira Glass

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “I wish that someone had said to me that it’s normal to feel lost for a little while.”

— Ira Glass

8. “Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.”

— Ira Glass

9. “We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.”

— Ira Glass

10. “We’re Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.”

— Ira Glass

11. “Everything is more compelling when you talk like a human being, when you talk like yourself.”

— Ira Glass

12. “Go looking for an idea and it’ll show up. Begin now.”

— Ira Glass

13. “Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.”

— Ira Glass

14. “You’ll hit gold more often if you simply try out a lot of things.”

— Ira Glass

15. “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.”

— Ira Glass

16. “You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.”

— Ira Glass

17. “It’s not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he’s fun to read out loud.”

— Ira Glass

Featured in: Fun Quotes

18. “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.”

— Ira Glass

19. “I seen a pig so big it’d block out the sun.”

— Ira Glass

20. “If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get lucky.”

— Ira Glass

21. “You just have to fight your way through.”

— Ira Glass

22. “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.”

— Ira Glass

23. “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.”

— Ira Glass

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “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.”

— Ira Glass

25. “I can only control what I can control.”

— Ira Glass

26. “I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.”

— Ira Glass

27. “It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

— Ira Glass

28. “Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.”

— Ira Glass

29. “Perfectionism: the need to be right instead of being right.”

— Ira Glass

30. “But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.”

— Ira Glass

31. “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.”

— Ira Glass

32. “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.”

— Ira Glass

33. “You just want to try a bunch of stuff, because you don’t know what’s going to be great.”

— Ira Glass

34. “But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you’re being sincere all the time.”

— Ira Glass

35. “Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.”

— Ira Glass

36. “Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I cant even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.”

— Ira Glass

37. “You’d think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.”

— Ira Glass

38. “I didnt have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.”

— Ira Glass

39. “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.”

— Ira Glass

40. “I suppose I shouldn’t go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.”

— Ira Glass

41. “Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn’t fun?”

— Ira Glass

Featured in: Fun Quotes

42. “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.”

— Ira Glass

43. “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.’”

— Ira Glass