“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 coziness? I have.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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“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.”

Wilfrid Sheed

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“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.”

Jon Stewart

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“I suggest that the most important interview is the child’s interview of the teacher. The child is preparing to leave the caring and loving environment of his parents, where he is free to act as he chooses. Is this teacher worthy of his trust?”

Lakshmi Kripalani

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“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.”

Mark Twain

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