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The Penguin Book of Interviews
632 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 15, 2026
This took me ages to finish. More than four years, and it is because most of the interviews are not that interesting, and I would say most of the interviews are not really interviews.
An interview, I would say is a journalistic form where you have someone who asks questions and someone, preferably someone interesting, to answer the questions. And nothing more. But most of the interviews presented here are more or less recollections of conversations with lots of thoughts of the interviewer. I realize that a proper interview is in most cases only pretending to be an exact recording (having been edited) but I like to think that I am getting what was really going on, and no interpretations.
There are some amazing people collected here, starting with Brigham Young. We have Karl Marx, Bismarck, Kipling, Zola, Chesterton, Hitler, Al Capone, Stefan Zweig, Hemingway, Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
None of those made such a huge impression on me that I would think I should reread them at any time.
And since I did not make any notes I cannot say much about them except for the ones I read most recently. The one with Nabokov I found interesting, mainly because he uses his wife as a sort of outsourced memory. John Lennon answered the question of whether he was a genius with a resounding “yes” (with only the small caveat that there are any at all.) Mae West who is the source of so many aphorisms said that there are no plants in her apartment because they use up too much oxygene. And William Burroughs quotes from Ulysses: “How dull is it to rust unburnished, not to shine in use” and when the interviewer is surprised by the quote he says it is by Tennyson. I hope I will be able to spice up a conversation with that in the future.
Maybe I should have taken notes.
5/10
An interview, I would say is a journalistic form where you have someone who asks questions and someone, preferably someone interesting, to answer the questions. And nothing more. But most of the interviews presented here are more or less recollections of conversations with lots of thoughts of the interviewer. I realize that a proper interview is in most cases only pretending to be an exact recording (having been edited) but I like to think that I am getting what was really going on, and no interpretations.
There are some amazing people collected here, starting with Brigham Young. We have Karl Marx, Bismarck, Kipling, Zola, Chesterton, Hitler, Al Capone, Stefan Zweig, Hemingway, Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
None of those made such a huge impression on me that I would think I should reread them at any time.
And since I did not make any notes I cannot say much about them except for the ones I read most recently. The one with Nabokov I found interesting, mainly because he uses his wife as a sort of outsourced memory. John Lennon answered the question of whether he was a genius with a resounding “yes” (with only the small caveat that there are any at all.) Mae West who is the source of so many aphorisms said that there are no plants in her apartment because they use up too much oxygene. And William Burroughs quotes from Ulysses: “How dull is it to rust unburnished, not to shine in use” and when the interviewer is surprised by the quote he says it is by Tennyson. I hope I will be able to spice up a conversation with that in the future.
Maybe I should have taken notes.
5/10
July 15, 2024
Stalin ones were excellent + Freud and Picasso were fun to read + Thatcher and Marilyn Monroe could’ve been done way better + the US presidents were boring to read + wished the one on Pankhurst was longer
November 20, 2010
Unfortunately less than half of the interviews in the book are worth the effort of putting up with the rest. There are too many interviews of mildly interesting celebrities and not enough of historically important figures. The bright spots are: Karl Marx, Thomas Edison, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tsedong, JFK, Hitchcock, Stalin, and Hoffa.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews