Questioning Strategies Quotes

It's not enough to have the right answers. You have to have the right questions.

That's sort of a trick question, and I don't have a trick answer. Next question, please.

With the long-format interview, I can get into really interesting conversations with my guests. You know what it's like to get the opportunity to speak to really interesting people and pick their brain about things. To have time to let a guest actually speak and tell a story and get into detail is really exciting.

A lot of reporters don't have conversations - they just fire off questions. I'm going to listen to what you're saying. If you start giving me a pat answer, I'm going to challenge you. That's where my sports background helps, because athletes do it all the time. So you have to stop them... and sometimes they're going to yell back at you. So what?

The key to being a good interviewer is to listen, no matter how heinous the act that person has committed, you have to listen to them and ask the right questions to get the truth out.

I don't see myself as a Larry King or somebody. When you do interviews, sometimes it turns to interrogations. I'm more of a conversationalist, not throwing hardball questions.

My policy with interviewing is I'm not there to teach the people I'm across from a lesson.

Great questions make great reporting.

So I don't think that the default mode of aggressive interviewing is useful, because politicians just build a defence against it. In fact, they thrive on 'Today' because they know what's going to happen.

This is the first lesson for writers - or anyone - who conducts interviews: If you want someone to talk, you've got to know how to listen. And good listening is a surprisingly active process. The interviewee is your focus of attention; you are there to hear what he says and thinks, exclusively.

Just as someone who's been interested in radio and programming for so long, I can usually tell when an interviewer is doing a segment just to fill a programming slot. They ask questions, but they don't care about the answers.

I think reporters think that they can get something extra out of a person face-to-face, but in reality people just give stock answers because there's a social situation going on.

I have listened to tapes of myself interviewing people and mostly I try to be better at directing the conversation.

I've always thought that bartenders and hairstylists would be great interrogators because all day long they have to listen to people talk. They could probably make some fugitive spill the beans.