It’s my job to help these people, the experts as well as the artists, focus and present their thoughts.

That’s one of the reasons I love working on radio: You might be a public figure but you’re essentially just a voice, and this lets each person who listens form whatever image of you he or she wants—tall or short, fat or thin, sex bomb or schoolmarm, straight or gay. The invisibility of radio was something I took comfort in early in my career, when

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

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.”

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

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.

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

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

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.