QUOTES by Stefan Sagmeister
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
I feel like, in general in my work life, my main goal has been to just be in a situation where I'm not bored with my job. That's been the entire principle. Got my wish.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
Unless you work for '60 Minutes', your life is: You do stories about things, and nothing happens as a result.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
The atheist market is a very overlooked and powerful market, it turns out.
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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.
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I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day.
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I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.
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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.
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In general in New York, we all eat like kings. Insane quality, mind-blowing variety, at all price ranges.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.
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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.
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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.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
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When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.'
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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?
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
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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.
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I am mostly a pretty worried person. In conversations, I am always worried about what to say.
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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.
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But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
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We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
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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.
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But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
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You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.
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I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
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.
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I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister
I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television.
Quote by -Stefan Sagmeister