> I sometimes think about Paul McCartney. People always say, “Oh, Paul McCartney, he sold out. He writes popular music.” Paul McCartney is as true to himself as John Lennon was true to himself. They just had different interests. One of the things that I find is that I tend not to be very good at making commercial Hollywood movies. Every time I try, I fail, because I don’t understand them. I worked with Denzel Washington and he understands how to make a good Hollywood movie. He understands what the audience is thinking and wanting and knows how to do that without being crass. It’s an art; it’s a skill. It’s just a question of what your goal is. I do think about what I want from the second half of my life. I don’t know what I want to do…

As someone else said, "They’re sort of adorably snobby."

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five is a black comedy mixing satire with science fiction. It was based on his experiences in World War Two where he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden. In this interview recorded a year before his death he discusses his memory of that war, his attitude to President Bush and reveals some of his literary heroes.

An interview with David Foster Wallace, made in September 2006. Parts of the interview were broadcast on Radio Svoboda and published in SHO magazine (in Russian) and The New York Review of Books. The full text of the interview has never been published before.

I was recently asked what to do when a potential employer asks this question. In my opinion, it’s kind of a dumb “gotcha” question that, half the time, they’re only asking because they’re “interviewing a candidate”, and that’s one of the things you’re supposed to ask.

I'm spending the week of Thanksgiving aboard Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas, where Internet access costs $35 for one hour. So in honor of my isolation on a cruise ship, here's the transcript of a phone interview I did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998.

INTERVIEWER

Are there significant disadvantages to your present fame?

NABOKOV

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

Most people have been asked that perennial, and somewhat annoying, question: "Where do you see yourself in five years?" Of course it is asked most often in a job interview, but it may also come up in a conversation at a networking event or a cocktail party. Knowing and communicating your career goals is challenging for even the most ambitious and focused person. Can you really know what job you'll be doing, or even want to be doing, in five years?

With humor you have to look out for traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play it down. In fact, if there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it— playing it down.

If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?

WODEHOUSE

I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel—if it’s a novel of action—depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “Which are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, “This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,” you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

I think that I lost some readers at various points. It was just a natural process of attrition, that’s all. People go on, they find other things. Though I also think that I have changed as a writer over the years, in the sense that I’m not providing exactly the same level of escape that ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, or even The Stand does. There are people out there who would have been perfectly happy had I died in 1978, the people who come to me and say, Oh, you never wrote a book as good as The Stand. I usually tell them how depressing it is to hear them say that something you wrote twenty-eight years ago was your best book. Dylan probably hears the same thing about Blonde on Blonde. But you try to grow as a writer and not just do the same thing over and over again, because there’s absolutely no point to that.

I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it’s not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert. I have no energy. I never have. I just have no desire to be productive. Now that I realize I don’t hate to write, that I just hate to work, it makes writing easier.

You’ve quoted Pudovkin to the effect that editing is the only original and unique art form in film.
I think so. Everything else comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

60 years of interviews with noted writers.

Is it possible we will always be obsessed with Winona Ryder? If she keeps doing films such as Black Swan, the answer is yes. Alex Pappademas talks with our eternal crush

During a behavioral interview, always listen carefully to the question, ask for clarification if necessary, and make sure you answer the question completely. Your interview preparation should include identifying examples of situations from your experiences on your resume where you have demonstrated the behaviors a given company seeks. During the interview, your responses need to be specific and detailed. Tell them about a particular situation that relates to the question, not a general one. Briefly tell them about the situation, what you did specifically, and the positive result or outcome. Your answer should contain these four steps (Situation, Task, Action, Result or "STAR") for optimum success.

Award-winning statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman says that uncertainty is an important part of life, and recognition of that uncertainty is itself an important step. This is where statistics can help us

Paola Antonelli is senior curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. Benoit Mandelbrot is the father of fractal geometry. While studying architecture at the Politecnico in Milan in the 1970s, Antonelli was inspired by Mandelbrot’s geometric ideas and visualizations, and eventually wrote her thesis on “Fractal Architecture.” The two met for the first time last year when Antonelli invited Mandelbrot to a Seed/MoMA Salon, a monthly gathering of scientists, designers, and architects. Just before Antonelli’s new Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit opened at MoMA in February, they reconnected to discuss fractals, architecture, and the death of Euclid.

If anyone can be said to represent the spirit of an entrepreneurial generation, the man to beat for now is the charismatic cofounder and chairman of Apple Computer, Inc., Steven Jobs. He transformed a small business begun in a garage in Los Altos, California, into a revolutionary billion-dollar company--one that joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years, faster than any other company in history. And what's most galling about it is that the guy is only 29 years old

Author, publisher and literary trendsetter: Dave Eggers is all those, and he's fast becoming the conscience of liberal America too. Here he tells how he went from 'staggering genius' to the man who gives a voice to the downtrodden and dispossessed

No matter what they think of his acting, everyone seems to love Keanu Reeves. He tells Ryan Gilbey about Bill & Ted's return, hogging extra takes and becoming an internet meme

Throughout the following interview, which took place over two consecutive afternoons, he showed a readiness to laugh that was pleasantly out of keeping with the quiet of the office. He’s clearly a busy man and by his own admission a reluctant talker, but once serious conversation began I found him focused and forthcoming. He spoke fluently, but with extended pauses between statements, taking great care to give the most accurate answer possible. When the talk turned to jazz or to running marathons, two of his great passions, he could easily have been mistaken for a man twenty years younger, or even for a fifteen-year-old boy.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, answers readers' questions about the release of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables

Here is the last installment of the Murakami interview, which was originally published in Yomiuri Shimbun in 2009. If you read Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview, you’d already know that if something out of Murakami’s mouth sounds weird, it’s my translation, not Murakami -

Anyway, I’m going to post my reading thoughts later on 1Q84… but below is my translation of Murakami’s interview with Yomiuri Shimbun, on June 18, 2009, regarding 1Q84. Because of its length, I will have to break up the translation in several parts… the first part below -

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!"

How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for…

“MY OWN PLAN FOR THE COMING FOURTEEN MONTHS IS TO KNOCK ON DOORS AND STUFF ENVELOPES. MAYBE EVEN TO WEAR A BUTTON. TO TRY TO ACCRETE WITH OTHERS INTO A DEMOGRAPHICALLY SIGNIFICANT MASS. TO TRY EXTRA HARD TO EXERCISE PATIENCE, POLITENESS, AND IMAGINATION ON THOSE WITH WHOM I DISAGREE. ALSO TO FLOSS MORE.”

Yes, indeed, The Godfather is masterful. The Sopranos? We never missed an episode. But you want to talk about a movie that leaves a mark? Twenty years after the release of GoodFellas, the good people behind it—Scorsese, Liotta, De Niro!—re-create the making of the truest, bloodiest, greatest gangster film of all time

The complete interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the D5 Conference.

This collection of David Foster Wallace recordings was originally collected by Ryan Walsh in early 2009. This website was built and is maintained by Jordyn Bonds.

The graphs, diagrams and match reports on Zonal Marking are pored over by thousands of football fans the world over and have helped push tactical analysis towards the centre of mainstream football debate in the United Kingdom. Set up in January this year, the phenomenally successful website received an average of 210,000 visitors per week during the World Cup and counts tactical mastermind Jonathan Wilson among its many admirers.

Variously believed to be the work of either a particularly public-spirited professional coach or a crack team of disaffected former Opta employees, the force behind ZM is in fact one man: Michael Cox. He very kindly agreed to grant his first ever interview to Football Further.

RT @longformorg: Bill Murray grants @fierman a rare interview, explains philosophy of multiple retirements: http://bit.ly/dAhDmF (new @G ...

He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him.

John Gruber's Mac and iPhone setup.

This article on US film critic Roger Ebert and his heath has been widely referenced and shared, so I was pleased to finally read it. It's a fascinating portrait of a man who, faced with considerable adversity, has thrown himself into life and work, for the better. A great piece.

"The author David Foster Wallace '85, a towering figure in modern literature, died on Sept. 12. Best known for his novel Infinite Jest, Wallace received an honorary degree from Amherst in 1999. That year, Amherst magazine writer Stacey Schmeidel interviewed Wallace by mail. The feature-length Q & A, titled "Brief Interview With a Five Draft Man," ran in the Spring 1999 issue of the magazine, and is reprinted here."