Terry Gross
Terry Gross
Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview format radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by NPR. She has been in this position since 1975 and has conducted thousands of interviews over the 40 years working at the job...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth14 February 1951
CountryUnited States of America
kind bureaucracy
There's so much kind of bureaucracy involved with the whole concept of net neutrality and like technical stuff.
thinking essence ideas
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.
reality risk needs
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.
memories self knowing
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.
moving trying energy
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.
self invisible pleasure
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.
disappointment people trying
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.
confused thinking asking-questions
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.
art thinking doctors
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.
mother self differences
An interesting difference between African-American humor and Jewish humor, in it's kind of basic or maybe most austere type form is, African-American humor, some of it comes out of playing the dozens in which you insult the other person or insult the other person's mother, and so much of Jewish humor is like, you're insulting yourself. It's totally self-deprecating.
thinking ideas issues
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.
thinking differences america
A lot of the things that we think of as being racial differences are really class differences in America.
mother dad kids
"The Prince Of Tides" is a lot about my mother - what my mother would do after Dad would hit one of the kids or hit two of the kids, hit all the kids, hit her, she would usually get in the car. We'd drive out. She would say, I'm going to divorce him. I'm never going back.
mother father book
So when the book came out, my mother stunned us all by leaving my father. I think three months before the book came out, she left my father the day he retired from the Marine Corps. They had a parade and march, and she came home and left.