TERRY GROSS

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.

I respect someone's right to privacy and I want them to know it.

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

I've never seen radio as the minor leagues, where I'm just really preparing to be in the show that really counts, namely, television, which is, I think, what people often assume. I've never felt that way.

What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being found out.

I know that everyone who listens to radio creates you in a visual image that they need you to have. Whatever that is, I thought, let them have it. Let me be who the listener needs me to be and let me not contradict that with the reality of my photograph and risk disappointing them.

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

Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private. But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.

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 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.

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.

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.

I love songs. Songs are my favorite things.

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

I work in a medium where I get to be totally invisible and I get great pleasure from that, being a pretty self-conscious person.

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

I'm not the betting kind.

It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.

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.

Most people I know that have work that is very meaningful to them pay the price of having to work all the time.

Google started as a free search engine. It's still free, but now it's making a lot of money on ads, right? A lot of money.

When we spoke, Gene Wilder had just written a memoir called "Kiss Me Like A Stranger." The title was suggested by his late wife Gilda Radner three weeks before she died in 1989.

A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.

I really believe people should be paid for the work that they do.

I have to match wits with the ads. Like, there's pop-ups that, like, move around and you have to chase them like it was a video game or something. And then there's ads where, like, you know, the X to, like, close the ad screen is so kind of small that you can't find it and you have to actually go looking for it. And so I spend all my energy - instead of, like, absorbing what the advertiser wants to communicate to me, I spend my energy trying to figure out how to defeat the ad.