You know, how am I leading my own life? What am I denying? Since I brought such great powers of denial into my adult life, what am I not doing as a husband? What am I not doing as a father? The whole thing started unraveling with me that once I kept it up close to the chest, I could hold it all in, but once I started letting it out, it all started coming out.
Terry GrossMy 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.
Terry GrossI'm first generation American, and my parents were both from Nigeria. And so I always say that I'm literally an African American. So my last name is Famuyiwa, it's different. And so that was a part of my experience from people not being able to pronounce it to not sort of having sort of a shared, common history with a lot of the kids that I was growing up with because my parents were from Africa.
Terry GrossGoogle 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.
Terry GrossIf 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.
Terry GrossAnd once you say this is true, you start naming the beast that hurts you - so I started doing this. Other truths come out.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossSometimes when I'm on the internet, I'll get this, like, which of these ad experiences would you prefer? And I'll have a choice of, like, a car, a pharmaceutical item or, you know, clothing. And I'm thinking, like, I don't want any of these. Do I have to choose?
Terry GrossIt seems that's where Bill Clinton came in last night because he told this long story about how they met [with Hillary Clinton], how he courted her, how he bought a house to convince her, I think after the third proposal, to actually marry him. And he talked about her activism and her commitment and everything. And it was as if he could tell the narrative in a way that she couldn't.
Terry GrossSo if Hillary [Clinton] is elected president, it will make history in two ways. She'll be the first woman president. And Bill Clinton, he'll be the first man and the first former president to return to the White House in the capacity of spouse.
Terry GrossThe 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.
Terry GrossThe 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.
Terry GrossI work in a medium where I get to be totally invisible and I get great pleasure from that, being a pretty self-conscious person.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossMy parents were pretty open about a lot of things, especially my mom. And any kind of little crazy thing I was into, she was very supportive of. You know, whether it was BMX bike racing or being in the Boy Scouts or surfing or anything else, she always seemed to sort of support it. And I think it's because she was an immigrant and that idea of sort of having her kids be able to have access to their dreams and whatever they wanted to follow was very important to her.
Terry GrossDonald Trump's hair frankly. Sometimes you know you're going to get criticism, but you just have to take .
Terry GrossThere should be a revenue stream that helps pay for the publication or for the work and helps pay the people who do it.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry Gross[Hillary Clinton] really wants to be president. She wanted to be president in '08. She's hardly left the spotlight.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossOne of the things Donald Trump has criticized Hillary [Clinton] for is discrediting women who said they'd had affairs or been sexually harassed by her husband.
Terry GrossThat 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.
Terry GrossGene Wilder made his movie debut in "Bonnie And Clyde," starred in the Mel Brooks films "The Producers," "Young Frankenstein" and "Blazing Saddles," played opposite Richard Pryor in "Silver Streak" and "Stir Crazy" and portrayed the candy-maker in "Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory."
Terry GrossMost people I know that have work that is very meaningful to them pay the price of having to work all the time.
Terry GrossAnd 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.
Terry GrossAn 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.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossBased on the number that they found, The New York Times reported that Hillary [Clinton] had basically clinched the primary 'cause you added the superdelegates to the number of delegates you'd already gotten. But this was on the eve of the California and New Jersey primary.
Terry GrossI'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.
Terry GrossI was in an adolescent psychology class at Citadel when the guy said, if you had a mother who was beaten, there's a great chance you'll beat your wife. And if you were beaten as a child, there's a terrific chance you're going to be a child-beater.
Terry GrossAll my brothers and sisters have stories about Dad like this. I remember, when my sister was about to beat him in checkers for the first time, he knocked the board over.
Terry GrossDad 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.
Terry GrossI 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.
Terry GrossThe 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.
Terry GrossI'm wondering if the Roger Ailes scandal in which more than 20 women have come forward accusing him of sexual harassment is going to affect that narrative that's directed against Hillary [Clinton] and her husband pertaining to his infidelities.
Terry GrossWhen 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.
Terry Gross