Public Radio Quotes

One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.

For people starting public radio shows, one of the things you have to do is you have to talk every single public radio station into picking you up.

I listen to National Public Radio, which, to me at least, presents the most rounded view of things.

Public radio has always been so powerless.

For a long time I was trying to be poppier and younger. I didn't want to be on public radio or do any of that stuff for older people. Then I realized that that is exactly what I listen to.

I usually draw in silence, but listen to music or public radio when I'm painting, after all the important decisions have been made.

I still believe in public radio's potential. Because it's the one mass medium that's still crafted almost entirely by true believers.

Public radio is alive and kicking, it always has been

I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people. It's in Vermont. I don't think I'd be very good at Weed Dating.

I get younger people who watch Conan or The Daily Show, but before that it was mostly people who knew me from public radio. Those people are kind of old.

The thought of people in this day and age sitting down to listen to a radio variety show on Saturday evening is rather implausible and was even more so in 1974 when we started “A Prairie Home Companion.” Thank goodness Minnesota Public Radio was too poor to afford good advice or the show never would've got on the air. We only did it because we knew it would be fun to do. It was a dumb idea. I wish I knew how to be that dumb again.

I thought A Prairie Home Companion would be an interesting thing to do for a summer or so. Public radio was just seven years old in 1974. It was a tiny organization in which a lot of things got started simply because there was all this time to fill. If you wanted to do an hour on Lithuanian folk dancing, you probably could have done it.

To be a DJ was to be God. To be a DJ at an alternative public radio station ? That was being God with a mission. It was thinking you were the first person to discover The Clash and you had to spread the word.

Public radio is the last oasis of free and independent music. For satellite radio channels, you have to subscribe; commercial stations are as corporate as basic cable.

Cable would not translate into the public radio universe.

But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.

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.

I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting distributes an annual appropriation that we provide in accordance with a statutory formula, the vast majority of which goes directly to public radio and television stations.

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax and spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh... and everybody's high!

I was never ambitious. I just wanted to have quiet, calm, listen to public radio and say, hello, how are you? Sit down, rest. But I had an early partner named Fred Freeman, a wonderful writer who I met at Northwestern. And I thought we were doing very well with "Jack Paar," and he said, no, we got to go to Hollywood. We got to write sitcom. It's the coming thing.

I called all the major network news bureaus, including Public Radio, and reported ozone AIDS cures coming out of Europe. Not a single reporter or show called back for details. I wrote and sent documentation to all the 'household word' TV talk show hosts who make their living acting 'concerned' and I tried all the 'AIDS fund raising spokespeople', show business celebs, even sending proof of their home addresses, but as of yet not one single phone call or inquiry came back for more.

I went to high school right outside Dallas, and (songwriter and performer) Michael Martin Murphey was a senior there when I was a sophomore or junior, really into folk and acoustic music. Larry Gross, who's the host of "Mountain Stage" on public radio, and B.W. Stevenson, also a musician, were there at the same time, too. Michael was a big inspiration -- through him I discovered Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Jimmy Rogers. Then I ran into Jerry Jeff Walker there in Dallas back when he was just a folk singer. Those are my earliest influences.