An interesting bit from a David Foster Wallace reading circa Infinite Jest:
I would go to halfway houses and just sit there. I lurked a lot. Nice thing about halfway houses is they are real run-down and real sloppy and you can just sit around. And the more you sit around looking uncomfortable and out of [...]
The last bit from a 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace [pdf] in Whiskey Island Magazine, some advice for young writers:
This is a long haul. Writing is a long haul. I’m hoping that none of the stuff that I’ve done so far is anywhere close to the best stuff I can do. Let’s hope we’re [...]
About a dozen years ago, Bj??rk interviewed composer Arvo P?§rt. P?§rt has written a number of things I like… Spiegel im Spiegel; Silouans Song; Credo; F?ºr Alina, etc. [via atlanta composers]
In an otherwise unremarkable interview with its inventor, I learned that Lenin played the Theremin:
I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the [...]
“It’s worth knowing about ten times as much as you ever use, so you can move freely.”—Ian McEwan
From an interview with Jimmy Carter:
Q: You’ve written memoirs, a historical novel, a children’s book, poetry—all while running the Carter Center. How many cups of coffee do you drink a day?
A: Well, I get up early. (Laughs.) I’m a farmer, still. I get up around 5 o’clock in the morning when I’m home, so I [...]
You don’t know how to play better just because you’ve suffered. The blues don’t come from picking cotton.
I’ve never read anything quite like Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis. The book collects about four decades’ worth of his life, broken up across a couple dozen interviews that were published in small jazz [...]
Miles Davis on drawing as therapy:
Yeah, you know, I stopped for a while. I really started to sketch again after I married Cicely. Because she takes so long. You know how actresses are. They take so long to get ready for anything, you know. Rather than scream at her, I just started sketching.
New Yorker profile of Will Oldham, whose music I’ve grown to love love love over the past year or so.
“How did you become a poet?”
“Reluctantly.”
Charlie Rose interviews U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan and James Billington of the Librarian of Congress:
If I’ve written this written this properly, it’s like condensed soup… it should be reconstitutable in the mind of the reader and it should come out just about right if you’ve had a chance to [...]
From an interview with Anthony Bourdain, a passage on those beautiful moments and how they feel kind of sucky at the same time:
I‚Äôve talked elsewhere about there are times in your life… I‚Äôll use the example of you‚Äôre standing alone in the desert, and you see the most incredible sunset you‚Äôve ever seen and your [...]
“I don’t avoid repeating myself. I rip myself off all the time.” -Chip Kidd
George Carlin’s last interview is really good. He talks about language, writing, drugs, religion, life, the whole deal.
Josh Brolin on working with the skimpy dialogue in No Country for Old Men:
You have to figure out different ways to convey ideas. You don’t want to over-compensate because the fear is that you’re going to be boring if nothing’s going on. You start doing this and this and taking off your hat and putting [...]
Alex Ross writes about the life and music of John Luther Adams.
Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin [...]
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and [...]
There’s a really good, really funny interview with Richard Price in the Believer:
I have to be a little intimidated by what I’m writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can master this, I don’t think I can get under the skin [...]
An interview with Mythbusters:
We’re just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science… That being said, the fact that we don’t have formal training, [...]
This interview with Philip Gourevitch is mostly about interviewing, but I like this, too:
My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I don‚Äôt know how to say it without it being pretentious—I‚Äôll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, [...]
This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:
Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?
Eakins: No, I always wanted to [...]
From an interview with Christian Landers, he of Stuff White People Like:
We have a generation of white people who want nothing more than to distance themselves from being white. They need to believe that the earth is being destroyed by evil white people, culture is ruined by the wrong kind of white people, and that [...]
I like this bit from an interview with Ellen Lupton, talking about common design pitfalls: “My students avoid printing out their work, to save time and money, but then they are disappointed that it doesn‚Äôt look good. I explain to them that everything looks good on the screen, because of the glowing light and the [...]
Terry Gross interviewed Chuck Close a couple years ago. Chuck Close is known for his super-large portraits built up from smaller bits. For some reason I just really liked his interviewing style. [via 43 folders]
Nick Hornby interviews David Simon, of The Wire fame:
There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more [...]
A panel interview with Seth and Chris Ware conducted by Ivan Brunetti, told in comics form. I love the way that Gordon McAlpin, the cartoonist, mimicked each of their styles when they had the floor.
Chip Kidd interviews Milton Glaser: “My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can‚Äôt overcome a father‚Äôs resistance you‚Äôre never going to be able to overcome the world‚Äôs resistance.”
From Nathan Ihara’s review of the Paris Review Interviews, II: “the art of the interview requires something very different from a mere investigation of the mechanics of fiction. Leave theory and technique to the essay or manual. An interview is a wonderful art form, similar to a one-act play, with an unswerving goal: to expose [...]
I’d never thought to look for it before, but I wish I had: interviewer Charlie Rose has an amazing online archive.
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