The Media Interview

…I’ll go on forever if the interviewer is well prepared, but I am a bit testy when it’s clear the interviewer hasn’t done any prep.

- Tom Peters, blogging about a long week of seminars and media interviews
from his website, November 4, 2007

I’ll come to your birthday party and do an interview for a hot dog and a glass of orange juice…

- Wrestler Chris Jericho on his willingness to do whatever it takes for media interviews
from an interview on Fight Network Radio October 23, 2007.

The most upsetting thing about taking the chance to be interviewed is that you can only be as smart and as clever as the person that’s interviewing you.

- Susan Sarandon
from Toxic Fame by Joey Berlin, Visible Ink Press, 1996, p.111

I provoke them [interview subjects] because I get involved, because my interviews are never cold, because I fall in love with the person who is in front of me, even if I hate him or her. An interview is a love story for me. It’s a fight. It’s a coitus.

- Oriana Fallaci
from an interview transcript published in Time magazine, October 20, 1975

There’s no way that I can sit here and be a normal human being, because being interviewed is one of the most abnormal things that you can do to somebody else. It’s two steps removed from the Inquisition.

- Frank Zappa
in a 1983 TV interview with Britain’s Channel 4, posted on YouTube

in my personal experience, the few really good interviewers have either breadth of knowledge or depth of insight

- Leonard Bernstein
quoted on journalist Martin Perlich’s website as part of a review of his book The Art of the Interview.

[A media interview is] a little bit of a performance, and it’s a little defensive, depending on your nature. But what could be more fun [than] to talk about yourself and have everyone stare at you like they’re really interested?

- Steve Martin
from an interview with Gayl Murphy - no date given
mentioned in the article Interview Tactics by Gayl Murphy

“…live interviews [are] performance masquerading as conversation.”

- Mike Nichols
quoted by his wife, Diane Sawyer, in a January/February 1995 CJR article Yakety-Yak: The Lost Art of Interviewing by Tom Rosenstiel

Giving a bad interview, it turns out, is a lot like getting a bad haircut: you spend about a week trying to avoid it as a topic of conversation, and when someone mentions it, you preemptively degrade it, secretly hoping they’ll tell you it’s “not so bad;” that in fact having sideburns of unequal length and no hair at all on the sides of your head makes you look dangerous and handsome. Then someone will inevitably dismiss conversational etiquette and agree that, yep, you sure did get one godawful haircut. The next day you buy a hat.

- Jay Pinkerton, comedy writer and editor of Cracked magazine
from his blog piece My Bad Interview, written in the wake of giving a… bad interview

I would rather ride down the street on a camel nude in a snowstorm backwards than give what is sometimes called an in-depth interview

- Warren Beatty, quoted by Barbara Walters in a 1990 interview and acknowledged as being something he once said.