Ira Glass Quotes

As a journalist, you're always worried, 'Did I get the full story?'

I have nothing to do with the selection of stories. I'm the reporter.

I wasn't the greatest reporter in the world, but I wasn't starting at zero.

As a print journalist, you can be frustrated by people who don't call you back, parts of the story you can't get. TV gets you access to everyone because people call you back. It also allows you to satisfy your curiosity. I am a very curious person.

My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

I am a hard-news journalist. That is what I do.

I wanted no other job than to work in newspapers. I was fascinated by the process of collecting information, talking to people and having the story appear in a paper that would be delivered in your letterbox.

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

When I was at a newspaper, I knew what an opportunity that was, and I religiously protected my time on the cop beat.

I'm a reporter by nature, I want to know everything.

The reporting has always been what drives me.

For somebody who is a journalist, I can be awfully unobservant sometimes.

My job is to get to the heart of a story, to find out what's really going on; to get it verified and, then, to get it out to as many people as possible as fast as.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

There's never any time I think I'm a real journalist, because I don't have any of the qualifications or the intentions for that.

Journalism, as concerns collecting information, differs little if at all from intelligence work. In my judgment, a journalist's job is very interesting.

I want to be a Kid Reporter because I would like to meet interesting people, and I also love being in front of the camera! As a Kid Reporter, I would love to learn how to be a better writer and interview people.

I had - all my life, everybody who knew me thought that I would probably grow up to be a reporter, a newspaper reporter because we didn't have much television in those days.

Well I just always wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

I started as a print reporter.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.