All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists

Unfortunately, these kinds of questions are often unanswerable. Craft goes only so far in explaining how an artist uses his gift, and the gift itself is often inexplicable.

When it comes to politicians and others in positions of authority, my rules are far less lenient. I don’t elicit their help in drawing the line between public and private, nor do I allow them to start an answer over. Politicians are so skilled at manipulating the press—in staying on-message and evading any question that isn’t to their liking—that i

I try in my interviews to find the connections between my guests’ lives and their work (the reason we care about them in the first place). I’d love to know how Chris Rock got to be so funny, how Dennis Hopper developed his screen presence, how John Updike became a great writer.

I also encourage them to take advantage of the fact that the interview is being recorded and will be edited for broadcast. If someone is in the middle of an answer before he realizes what it was he wanted to say, he’s welcome to go back and start again—we’ll edit out the false start.

The answer was something not even many of my colleagues and closest friends know about me, so I was a little hesitant to come right out with it. But I figured that as an interviewer myself, I had a responsibility to answer truthfully. I told the reporter I had wanted to be a lyricist. “No, no,” he said. “Tell me something interesting.” We might as

The interviews on Fresh Air sound conversational, or at least I hope they do.

“Being a celebrity can cause an accidental cheapening of the things one holds dear,” Steve Martin once wrote in The New York Times. “A slip of the tongue in an interview and it’s easy for me to feel I’ve sold out some private part of my life in exchange for publicity.”

This experience and others like it have taught me that when an interviewee clams up, it’s sometimes out of fear that the journalist he’s speaking with won’t fully comprehend what he’s saying or simply won’t care. This was an important lesson: It’s one of the reasons I try to be well prepared for each interview, on the assumption that a guest is mor

Autobiography provides an alternate route—a seeming detour that may ultimately tell us something about an artist’s sensibility and the experiences that shaped it.