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

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

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

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.

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

In his memoir Self-Consciousness, John Updike wrote that he was offering his as “a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.”

“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.”

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.