Michael Silverblatt Quotes

#1. I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror.

Michael Silverblatt

#2. I'm often a crier and many things make me cry. I come from a crying family - my mother cries, my grandma used to cry. It was never shameful to cry. My father never told me men don't cry.

Michael Silverblatt

#3. 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

#4. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.

Michael Silverblatt

#5. I'm very against interviewers who do not have time to read the work, who accept jobs knowing that they don't have time to do the preparation.

Michael Silverblatt

#6. The book is an experience that allows you to witness your feelings without having to surrender to them, to succumb to them, or to be battered by them. It gives you access to a deep knowledge of how you would respond to things you would never, thank goodness, have been required to experience.

Michael Silverblatt

#7. If I want to have a conversation, I can't have a list of questions, because the second question on the list is going to interrupt the conversation.

Michael Silverblatt

#8. People tell me I have the best job in the world, which is true, but I also work with some of the best people in the world.

Michael Silverblatt

#9. She taught you how to be a person who refuses anything but the meaningful.

Michael Silverblatt

#10. I thought I was going to be a math major. My parents were both accountants and wanted me to major in business. Math was our compromise.

Michael Silverblatt

#11. A beautiful word in the middle of a sentence can sometimes reduce me to tears in an interview, and when I'm reading, too. I've sometimes wondered whether I'm at the point of tears all the time because I use my eyes so much that they're strained and on the verge of tears anyway.

Michael Silverblatt