Ira Glass Quotes

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story.

Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

There is nothing wrong with just telling the story.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

I think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

Most people don't know how to tell stories.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.

A good storyteller is a person with a good memory and hopes other people haven't.

The challenge in fiction is to write a terrific story. The challenge in journalism is to communicate solid, objective information. The challenge in creative non-fiction is to do it both and to do it well.

As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important.

I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.

I'm a storyteller. If I have that on my precis when I go, 'Storyteller,' I'm satisfied with that.

A great story poorly told doesn't do anybody any good at all, and nobody wants to hear it, and nobody wants to read it. The craft of it is really more important than the subject matter.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

BoJack' is a very much a format-based show. The story should always match the format, but I don't necessarily think the story has to come first.