When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise.

I liked the people at Brown, while I really disliked most of the fellow students I had met at Northwestern.

I remember that in Baltimore, where I grew up, we would drive by the radio station and tower of WBAL, and I would try to picture the people inside and what they did there.

Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn't fun?

My first job on the radio was writing jokes for a Baltimore DJ called Johnny Walker, who was sort of a '70s era shock jock who all the teenage boys listened to in my school.

I am such a do-goody, people-pleasing kid - or I was - I don't think I've ever been fired, not even from an ice cream shop, magician for kids' parties, not even in my early jobs in radio.

I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television.

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.

I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal.

When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.

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

I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.

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

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

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.

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

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

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.

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

If you want somebody to tell you a story, one of the most easiest and effective ways is if you're telling them a story.

I feel like in an interview situation, it's a kind of intimacy that I can understand and handle - versus in real life, when I'm much more of a bumbler and have a hard time.

I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.

I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

I didn't watch T.V. from the time I was 18 'til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch 'The Sopranos.' I realized, 'Oh, T.V. is really interesting.'

It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. 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.

I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.

Honestly, like, I'm a superfan of the 'New York Times,' but I know nothing about how they put it together, and I really don't care.

I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.

I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.

In general in New York, we all eat like kings. Insane quality, mind-blowing variety, at all price ranges.

Not owning a car anymore, I feel like I'm barely an American. I miss it. And I barely ever get to listen to the radio in the car, which is the best place for radio.

I'm a cliche.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day.

I don't meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.

The Flash could do everything twice as fast. Except you never saw him think twice as fast or speak twice as fast. Could he do math faster than the other superheroes? Could he compute the tip for the bill twice as fast?

The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true.

I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio. 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.

I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

I only got interested in radio once I talked my way into an internship at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1978, never having heard the network on the air.

The atheist market is a very overlooked and powerful market, it turns out.

There is a feeling, when you listen to radio, that it's one person, and they're talking to you, and you really feel their presence as one person.

The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.

Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.