Terry Gross Quotes & Sayings

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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

I'm not the betting kind. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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

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. — Terry Gross

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

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

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

I mean, Dad's - you know, Dad's friendliest tone was a scream. — Terry Gross

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

I love the edited version of it. — Terry Gross

It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood. — Terry Gross

I love songs. Songs are my favorite things. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

I mean, Dad was one of these people who simply could not lose, you know? He could not stand it when a kid was beating him. He would go crazy when the child came to that moment, which, you know, you have to come to - I mean, Dad played Old Maids like he played football. He just simply had to win every single thing every single time. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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

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. — Terry Gross

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

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

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. — Terry Gross

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. — 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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

I'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 Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

All 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 Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

"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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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

I 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 Gross

My 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 Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

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. — Terry Gross

We grew up as this family of deniers. And people who knew us for years were stunned when "The Great Santini" came out because we had this appearance of being this happy, large, smiling family. We were taught to smile, put the best face forward. And so when the book ended up - Dad swatting us around the room, no one believed me. — Terry Gross

So the Great Santini was how he liked being referred to by his children. He would line up his seven children, and there was this ritual we'd go through. And he would say, who's the greatest of them all? And we - the seven - would say, you are, oh, Great Santini. And he would say, who knows all, hears all and sees all? You do, oh, Great Santini. So this was the ridiculous way I was raised. — Terry Gross

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 Gross