Interviewing People Quotes & Sayings

(While interviewing at the Hunan women's prison
'I have lived with several men, and let them amuse themselves with me. Because of that, I have been sent to two labour reeducation camps and been sentenced to prison twice. ( ... ) When people curse me for having no shame, I don't get angry. All the Chinese care about is "face", but they don't understand how their faces are linked to the rest of their bodies. — Xinran

When you are interviewing someone, never let your camera person turn off the camera. The second you turn off the camera, they'll say the magic thing that you'd been looking for the whole interview. People want to relax after the performance is done. Don't be afraid of awkward silence. That is your friend. — Marshall Curry

When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing. — Joe Sacco

I believe it's easier to be an actor. Somehow, interviewing seems to be intrusive on people's lives. — Wayne Rogers

I became the storyteller of South Side Chicago. I used an old Kiwi liquid shoe polish as a microphone. I'd go around the house interviewing everybody, telling stupid jokes, doing voices. I mimicked Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., people on 'Laugh-In,' Flip Wilson. — Bernie Mac

One of the difficulties about interviewing people in Rwanda is that the country is trying to get on with ordinary life and some people just don't want to get involved in this. — Tony Greig

I am really bad at actually interviewing people. — Graham Norton

I heard a story about her once,' said James. 'She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn't know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them. — Jon Ronson

When I was in Russia I found that I thought I was going to give these people that I was interviewing a whole bunch of choice in terms of what they could drink while we were chatting. — Sheena Iyengar

I don't mind when people are telling me about their 1971 Firebird, but it's the same thing as people telling me about their car or something. It's fine if you have an interest. By talking with me, though, you could be interviewing a novelist about guitars. It's the same thing, except I don't write that well either. — Jonny Greenwood

When abroad, behaveto everyone as if interviewing an honored guest; in directing the people, act as if you were assisting at a great sacrafice; DO NOT DO TO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD NOT LIKE DONE TO YOURSELF: so there will be no murmuring against you in the country, and none in the family; your public life will arouse no ill-will nor your private life any resentment. — Confucius

Why is it so important to have fun? Because if you love your work (or your activism or your family time), then you'll want to do more of it. You'll think about it before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up; your mind is always in gear. When you're that engaged, you'll run circles around other people even if they are more naturally talented. From what we've seen personally, the best predictor of success among young economists and journalists is whether they absolutely love what they do. If they approach their job like - well, a job - they aren't likely to thrive. But if they've somehow convinced themselves that running regressions or interviewing strangers is the funnest thing in the world, you know they have a shot. — Steven D. Levitt

Interviewing politicians and movie stars, you know what you'll get. I like the people-stories better. — Shepard Smith

No one that has ever been in combat ever wants to see war anywhere in the world. It is horrible. It's horrible looking at the pock-marked walls. It's horrible looking at the flesh embedded on walls in Bosnia. It was horrible looking and interviewing and talking to the kids who lost their parents, because Saddam Hussein decided to feed their parents to the lions in downtown Baghdad. To characterize particularly myself, but other groups, as wanting to advocate a war I think is not only disingenuous, I think it's a patent falsehood intentionally created to stigmatize a group of people. — Matt Shea

We look for people who are passionate about something. In a way, it almost doesn't matter what you're passionate about. What we really look for when we're interviewing people is what they've shown an initiative to do on their own. — Mark Zuckerberg

Interviewing people, I don't miss that at all. I do miss kibitzing with the audience because after every show I would spend half an hour to 40 minutes talking to people. — Oprah Winfrey

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself. — Errol Morris

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I'm a very realistic person. I don't trust anything New Age
or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don't trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I'm very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can't answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people
they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting. — Haruki Murakami

People do more important jobs than acting in film that should be recognised, but for some reason it's big money, so people are elevated in status. If I was a bus driver, I'm sure you wouldn't be interviewing me. — Adam Garcia

I can't imagine not reporting. It's such a habit of mind for me, I do it even in my social life. If I'm nervous at a party, I just start interviewing people. — Lorraine Adams

Weight is just not a hot button. In fact, during my life, it probably should have been on my radar screen a bit more. I look back at work photos and am shocked. Was I eating the people I was interviewing?! Good Lord, I was big. — Hoda Kotb

Interviewing people is pretty natural for me. — Nina Blackwood

After endless textbook readings and interviewing 'experts,' I still could not grasp the full concept of 'love,' the mystique of it, why people killed for it, or died for it. Even the experts were confused. Biologists said the phenomenom we called love was just a bombardment of chemicals that affected our brain: dopamine, which grabbed us the throat in the guise of lust, and oxytocin, which settled us down to the mundane complacencies of marriage. On the other hand, Behaviorists thought love was really the search for God. No one agreed. The thing most humans thought we knew about love, we didn't know at all. And all that we did not know was astonishing. Even more astonishing was what passed for love. — Kiana Davenport

As a professional journalist, I've been interviewing people for almost thirty years. And the one thing I've learned from all those interviews is that I am always going to be surprised. — Hector Tobar

Interviewing someone is a very proactive process and requires taking a lot of agency into your own hands to get past people's general normal self-preservation mode. — Brandon Stanton

Enough people write about me every day without even interviewing me. — Meryl Streep

We need to be aware that we are friendly with people we are interviewing, we aren't friends with them. — Chip Morgan

There have been people who represent something very symbolic and I've been freaked out interviewing them. — Joel Stein

I am interviewing people with a spirit of genuine interest and compassion, and therefore, the general tone of the site is one of genuine interest and compassion. The moment that culture changes, 'Humans of New York' is no longer viable. — Brandon Stanton

When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition. — Brandon Stanton

And I managed to arrange to get some research support and to stay in Hong Kong for another year and a half, interviewing people coming out of China, both Westerners and Chinese. And that was my first real research study on thought reform or so-called brainwashing. — Robert Jay Lifton

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story. — Chuck Klosterman

And again the news offered no news: On CNN, a rerun of Larry King interviewing the widowed and the suffering. On CNN2, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a fatherless son. On CNN3, a rerun of Flight 11 flying toward the first tower, in slow motion. On CNN4, a rerun of the tower collapsing, in slow motion, and again the towers fell, again people jumped and died. On CNN5, a rerun of Larry King interviewing a motherless daughter, a daughterless father, interviewing the motherless, fatherless, wifeless, husbandless, childless, shameless
disgusted, Bill pressed POWER and beheaded King, exiled CNN, and the world went dark. They sat relieved in the silence and dark. Not much road traffic now, but somewhere in the distant overhead the honk and flap of southbound geese, instinct bound, in vees for victory. The turkey was still on the table; the sides were still out. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are tired come home. — Pearl Abraham

It's the rejection that is hard. It's not the interviewing that's hard. It's not the photography that's hard. It's, you know, approaching people all day long and having a good portion of those people reject you and some of them be rude. — Brandon Stanton

I always spend time exploring the customs and attitudes of the countries I'm using for locations, and interviewing the people who live there. I've visited over 90 countries thus far. — Sidney Sheldon

Most of the people interviewing me are far more square than me. I think it's the ET thing. I'm sitting there, my hair is combed, and I'm in a suit. — John Tesh

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? — Michael Parkinson

Most / of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear the cries of the roses / being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully, / like horses in war. No, they shook their heads./ Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isn't it because of the clicking? / They stared at him. You should be / interviewing roses not people, said the science teacher. Geryon liked this idea. / The last page of his project / was a photograph of his mother's rosebush under the kitchen window. / Four od the roses were on fire. / They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets / and howling colossal intimacies / from the back of their fused throats. — Anne Carson

I never drove a car. I'm hopeless that way. I press the wrong buttons on the tape recorder. But if the person I'm interviewing helps me out, that person feels needed. People need to feel needed. — Studs Terkel

Yes, [I spent] two long years, traveling all over the United States, all over Europe, interviewing many, many, many people who had been thrown out of their academic jobs because they taught that there was a possibility of life coming from something other than Darwinism, who thought that possibly random selection and mutations didn't account for the universe, didn't account for gravity, didn't account for why nobody had ever seen an individual species evolve
no one's ever seen an individual species evolve! — Ben Stein

I don't care how much people understand what it is that I'm doing, except if they're players in my ensemble or other ensembles. I just want people to be moved by the music. If you're not moved by the music, then everything else falls away. You're not interested in the text, you're not interested in how it was done, and you're not interested in interviewing the composer and all the rest of it. — Steve Reich

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people. — Sam Altman

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. — Jeff Bezos

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read. — Frank Zappa

And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them. — Daniel Mendelsohn

What phrase was that, sir?" "You said something about interviewing people face to - - " He shook his head, his tongue dabbing quickly at his lips. "I would rather not say it. I think you know what I mean. The phrase conjured up the most striking picture of the two of us breathing - breathing one another's breath." The Solarian shuddered. "Don't you find that repulsive?" "I don't know that I've ever thought of it so." "It seems so filthy a habit. And as you said it and the picture rose in my mind, I realized that after all we were in the same room and even though I was not facing you, puffs of air that had been in your lungs must be reaching me and entering mine. With my sensitive frame of mind - - " Baley said, "Molecules all over Solaria's atmosphere have been in thousands of lungs. Jehoshaphat! They've been in the lungs of animals and the gills of fish." "That — Isaac Asimov

Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living. — Melissa Leo

Whenever television cameras are interviewing people in their homes, I tend to look over their shoulders and have a good snoop at their living rooms. I am always astonished at how clean they all look, with nothing out of place or unnecessary or dropped down any old how. — Craig Brown

Job-interviewing is just a skill. Like any skill, some people have more of a predisposition for it than others. — Dale Dauten

As a young man ... you don't know anything about yourself. And add on to that, you're on the cover of magazines. People are interviewing you about what you think. You feel like a real phony. — Ethan Hawke

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats. — Katie Hafner

One interview would lead us to another interview, which led us to another interview. We had the questions and the idea of chonicling this moment in time. But we didn't have a movie, per se. As we started interviewing people, it started to kind of define itself. — Keanu Reeves

In the course of interviewing, I've discovered that if you don't give your guest something to react to, they don't react. They simply say what they've been saying every time they've been interviewed. The last thing you want is to have people say to you what they've said to someone else. — Michael Silverblatt