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

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.

But I understand if they feel that starring in a new movie hardly requires them to reflect out loud on their inner lives.

I’ve learned the hard way not to make assumptions. That’s why before beginning an interview, I tell the guest to let me know if I’m getting too personal, in which case we’ll move on to something else

OF COURSE MY LISTENERS ARE INVISIBLE, too—at least to me. I’m always amazed by the diversity of the show’s listeners and the settings they listen in.

You never know how the program fits into someone’s day.

The interviews presented here were conducted on the run and are by no means “definitive.” But I hope you’ll accept them in the spirit in which they’re offered, as entertaining and thought-provoking conversations with people I believe are worthy of your time.

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

But he did say that he thought the accident had led him to become an actor. In his roles, he could express “frustrations, and sometimes angers, that are simply inappropriate in everyday life.”