...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

Ira Glass

Categorized in : Joy Stories Empathy

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. by Ira Glass

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

important can-do

What nobody tells people who are beginners… is that all of us who... by Ira Glass

What nobody tells people who are beginners… is that all of us who do

couple ambition years

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

something-better criticize

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap. by Ira Glass

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

humorous enough funny

You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all... If that happens, you're doing it right.

college stupid jobs

Great stories happen to those who can tell them. by Ira Glass

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

stories inspiring inspirational

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situati... by Ira Glass

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.

creating lucky writing

We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all aro... by Ira Glass

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

empathy joy world

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.

fighting graduation way

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.'

dust jobs fall

Don't wait till you're older, or in some better job than you have now. Don't wait for anything. Don't wait till some magical...idea drops into your lap. That's not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.

waiting jobs ideas

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.

stress graduation inspirational

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.

heart years interesting

The entire culture was organized for people who are happy. People who are miserable need reassurance that other people are miserable.

miserable culture people

I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.

challenges book art

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.

speech people world

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.

half people way

It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will.

aerodynamics law writing

I remember when I first got married, there was a certain amount of internet traffic on the subject of, "Who is this beard who is allegedly married to Ira Glass? Obviously, he's gay."

ira gay glasses

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

space long thinking