Terry Gross Quotes

I am literally smaller than life. I am an unextraordinary-looking person. I've seen people trying to hide their disappointment when they meet me, and I have to watch them get over it.

If you are interested in ideas, radio is way more pure than television. You're not distracted by somebody's nose or hair or posture. You can really see how someone thinks and penetrate to the essence of who that person is.

The line changed my life 'cause I thought of some poor woman I hadn't even met walking around the United States or the world not knowing she's going to be beaten up by me and these kids, unborn, not knowing they were going to be born into the family of a child-beater just because I was. So it really did have a great effect on me.

The sex drive is one of the most fundamental human urges, and throughout history, there have been laws regulating what is considered acceptable sexual behavior. In the past century, the law has had trouble keeping up with changing social and moral standards.

I don't want to help a politician revise the truth.

Dad mistook - for some reason unbeknownst to me - he mistook his family for a platoon of Marines. I mean, he - the exact same thing he brought to the disciplining of a squadron, a battalion, a platoon, he brought to the disciplining of his children. He ran the house - he had Saturday morning inspections for us, he had white-glove inspections for us as kids.

I think there's always an expectation when you're a first generation, especially a first-generation Nigerian, of sort of being a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. And so, you know, sort of my initial pursuits into the arts and that I was going to pursue film as a career didn't confuse them, but it was definitely something that they were scared about.

I've always been really curious about things and slightly confused by the world, and I think someone who feels that way is in a good position to be the one asking questions.

Rapists who might've been convicted were free to assault other women.

And once you say this is true, you start naming the beast that hurts you - so I started doing this. Other truths come out.

The excitement for me lies not so much in interviewing the hard-to-get famous person, but the person whom you are about to discover. You know, like maybe the character actors who are just coming into their own and you're realizing how great they are.

My father modestly referred to himself as the Great Santini when we were growing up. And he took it - I later learned he had seen a high-wire aerialist when he was a boy, and he was up doing acrobatics in his airplane, and when he came down one time - when was a young lieutenant - he said, I was better than the Great Santini today. And some of the other pilots heard it, and the nickname stuck.

And the rules were so clear, you could not deviate from that all. And I think it especially damaged my sisters because there was nothing they could do to get my father's attention, to win his approval. They could not play sports. They could not do these other things. They could not be tough. They could not be macho. And so I think they suffered just from sheer neglect if nothing else.

I think the interview form works best on the radio. There are a lot of personality traits conveyed in a person's voice, the rhythm of their speech or how confident they sound.

I think in particularly with young kids who don't have a lot of positive influences, pop culture almost becomes a larger part of that self-discovery and how you define yourself.

I was thinking about comedy and how comedy in many ways opens us up to ideas and really being influenced by Richard Pryor and sort of the way he would use comedy to really speak about larger social issues.

Often real life is boring and problematic. I love the edited version of it.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

Work can take on a new dimension if you know something about the artist.

The problem is that those of us who are lucky enough to do work that we love are sometimes cursed with too damn much of it.

That era in the late '80s through the '90s was really when the music was so new, fresh, energetic, but still creative. It hadn't quite gotten corporatized yet.

I don't think my father noticed that he had daughters. I think, you know, part of the damage of the childhood was, I simply don't think they were acknowledged as human beings at all. Or - you know, one of the reasons I became a cook later on in my life was, I was not allowed to cook an egg.

I love songs. Songs are my favorite things.