“I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.”

“I love serialized stories of any kind. I'm a huge sucker for any kind of series.”

“I think that if journalists, reporters who spend a lot of time on a story, are honest with themselves, we all have feelings about our subjects - I mean, unless you're a robot.”

“If he could go back, choose another career, my father would have liked to have been an environmentalist of some kind, which is why he'd really like to be remembered for something almost nobody knows he did: naming Earth Day. It agitated him to look up Earth Day on Wikipedia recently and not see his name anywhere. So a few days ago, I added it.”

“If you go to probably any jury trial in Baltimore that involves violence, either an assault or murder, and watch the voir dire, to me, that's when you get a sense of what it's like to live in Baltimore.”

“I'm thin-skinned in a way that's just dumb.”

“It would be great to do a story and get somebody who is innocent out of jail. That's a wonderful thing.”

“I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.”

“My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote 'Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.' He named Earth Day 'Earth Day.' It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily.”

“Not to be weirdly glib, but as a reporter, you should be honest all the time.”

“People just like a good crime story; they want to know who did it.”

“You know how everyone - there's this maxim that we all become our mother or we all become our parents. And, generally, I really wouldn't mind becoming my mother. I really like her, so I wouldn't mind becoming her. But I definitely need to edit her.”