Interviewing Style Quotes

Oprah Winfrey is a big role model for me from a business capacity and a creative capacity. She is an incredible interviewer who cultivated a certain style by inserting her own personhood into a show on national television at a time when no one was talking about empowerment, spirituality, or our inner lives.

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.

If Barbara Walters was interviewing me, I'd figure her career was as dead as mine!

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'm the best interviewer in the whole format. Except for Howard Stern, I'd put myself against anybody. Because I ask human questions.

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.

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?

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.

I like to think that I differ from other interviewers in the sense that I hide my agenda more successfully, and I'm more open to hearing stuff that is surprising and unexpected. That I'm actually involved in an investigation, through monologue, at times.

So much interviewing these days is about the presenter - I?m a clever boy, I?m going to be smart with people; or it?s a trivial - how do you like your eggs boiled?

Oprah has this intense curiosity that I haven't found with any interviewer.

The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.