Interview Technique Quotes

If an artist is going through a lot of bad publicity, I don't want to ask them about that. If they want to talk about it, I'll make them comfortable enough where they can bring that up on their own. Not only do I want them to feel comfortable, I want them to come back.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone's life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those.

When I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.

I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

I listen to WTF with Marc Maron, although I'm getting annoyed with him, he's a bit too intrusive and fawning. But he's done some great interviews in the past, like with David Simon, the writer of The Wire, and Bruce Springsteen. He gets fantastic guests. I just wish he let them talk more.

I actually interviewed other people about myself, and that alerted me to the fact that I had to really investigate my memories.

I have the version of me where I'm interviewing someone, where I definitely am the straight man, and I like to show a lot of respect to my guest and let them take the reins. I don't like to compete with my guests. I don't like to be funnier than my guests or get into a 'Who's wackier?' sort of thing.

I always thought Jon Stewart was an extremely good surgeon with his scalpel. He would have Republicans on who, I guess, were unclear about what Stewart was up to, and while Jon Stewart was being nice, he was building a case for drowning them.

'Waiting For Guffman' was different right away from 'Spinal Tap,' because we didn't show the interviewer. That person became invisible immediately. That created a different way of tuning it and ultimately editing it.

I don't find anything comes out of getting in someone's face during an interview and screaming.

When I interview people, and they give me an immediate answer, they're often not thinking. So I'm silent. I wait. Because they think they have to keep answering. And it's the second train of thought that's the better answer.

When I sit down to talk to men's magazines, there's a certain character that I play. She's not fully fleshed out - she doesn't have her own name - but she shows up to do men's-magazine interviews.

I take pride in how I interview people. One of the things people come to our show for most is the interaction I have with the artists; it feels very peer-to-peer.

I got offered to do a book yeah, and they said to me, 'Gem, you're so busy, how about we get someone to walk around with you with a dictaphone,' and that's how we did it.

What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.

I always had a much softer approach to my interviews and promos. I was not so much that wrestler that was yelling at the screen; I was always the one that was talking to my fans.

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.

When I interview people accused of capital offenses, I never even ask if they did it. I would consider that unprofessional.

If I ever interview somebody, I make sure I listen to them. As a comedian, I've gone on so many shows, I've wanted to take things to a crazy place. Sometimes the hosts don't like that.

I've never interviewed anyone where I set out to try to persuade them to reveal something. Instead, it's about creating a space that allows someone to be authentic without judgment on my part.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

There's only one interview technique that matters... Do your homework so you can listen to the answers and react to them and ask follow-ups. Do your homework, prepare.

Fortunately, I've done so many interviews that I've become very good at detecting when someone is giving a less-than-candid reply.

I was in a job interview and I opened a book and started reading. Then I said to the guy 'Let me ask you a question. If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?' He said 'I don't know'. I said 'I don't want your job'.