interview
Most writer interviews are not art at all, but a sort of cultural packaging. The cages are too small, the questioner’s powers too sweeping; what we want to know obliterates what the speaker wants to say.
“The Interview as Art,” in The Good Word and Other Words (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 211.
The interviewer wishes to visit me. He wishes to see my pencil poised above the page, my painted lampshade, my bookshelves, my old white borzoi asleep at my feet. He feels he needs the background music of bogus informality, and as many colorful details as can be memorized, if not actually jotted down (‘N. gulped down his vodka and quipped with a grin—’). Have I the heart to cancel the cosiness? I have.
Vladimir Nabokov’s introduction to Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), n.p.
You, my friend, are like ginger root. You are the ginger root of interviewers, in that you have pulled things out of me I never knew were there, and yet, still I leave not nauseous.
“Rachel Maddow interview with Jon Stewart,” The Rachel Maddow Show, November 11, 2010.
No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.
“Concerning the Interview,” 10-page handwritten essay, Mark Twain Project, University of California, Berkeley.