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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that's what our whole country is based on. It's amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he's basically just protein.