Jake

"Because novels come from long-marinated and unregarded anxiety, from silent anxiety…" - Martin Amis

If you don’t learn anything in the interview, that’s bad. If you are bored in the interview, that’s really bad. A good interview should feel like a conversation, not questions and responses.

Great questions don't appear

suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes

them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is

not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great

discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd

have made it.

In an ongoing study, Wilson observes college students who are left alone in a room, with no phone or other distractions, for 15 minutes. "They hate it," he said. "One would think we could spend that time mentally entertaining ourselves. But we can't. We've forgotten how."