I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.

Brad Pitt is so good-looking there's a lightbulb inside of him shooting good-looking-ness in all directions.

It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

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.

We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

I think the thing that I wish somebody would ask me is just to ask about the business side of the radio show. I feel like I actually work very hard to make sure the business side of the radio show runs, and no one has any interest in how a public radio show is run. And rightly so.