Playboy Interview: The Beatles
On fame, making money and agnosticism.
On fame, making money and agnosticism.
Jean Shepherd Playboy Feb 1965 35min Permalink
“I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a ‘helping profession.’ If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.”
Janet Malcolm, Katie Roiphe The Paris Review Apr 2011 35min Permalink
An interview with Lorde.
Tavi Gevinson Rookie Jan 2014 1h45min Permalink
Arriving in China at 23, Sidney Rittenberg spent 35 years as a “friend, confidante, translator, and journalist” for the Communist Party’s top leaders. In this interview, he recalls both his friendship with Chairman Mao and the 16 years he spent in solitary confinement.
Matt Schiavenza The Atlantic Dec 2013 20min Permalink
“Let them say what they want. It’s not about me.”
Barton Gellman Washington Post Dec 2013 15min Permalink
The Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman star on being married to Woody Allen, Jewish words, and Girls.
Claire Barliant The Toast Dec 2013 25min Permalink
“How much money do you make? And do you shave your pubic hair?”
Nicole Holofcener Interview Dec 2013 Permalink
INTERVIEWER: I imagine that people try to set you up as some sort of guru, whether political or metaphysical.
LESSING: I think people are always looking for gurus. It’s the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It’s quite terrifying.
Thomas Frick The Paris Review Apr 1988 30min Permalink
“And the Holocaust trumps art every time.”
David Samuels, Art Spiegelman Tablet Nov 2013 25min Permalink
The world’s richest prisoner interviewed from the Siberian prison colony he calls home.
Neil Buckley, Mikhail Khodorovsky Financial Times Oct 2013 25min Permalink
An interview with novelist Marilynne Robinson, conducted by a graduating student.
Thessaly La Force, Mariy Vice Sep 2013 15min Permalink
“Will you show me all of the man-in-the-street, sympathetic, mayoral candidates? The last time I met one of them on the subway was a long time ago. Let’s not get too carried away.”
Chris Smith New York Sep 2013 25min Permalink
Translation of an exclusive interview with Syrian President Bashar al_Assad:
“Have they not realised that since the Vietnam War, all the wars their predecessors have waged have failed? Have they not learned that they have gained nothing from these wars but the destruction of the countries they fought, which has had a destabilising effect on the Middle East and other parts of the world? Have they not comprehended that all of these wars have not made people in the region appreciate them or believe in their policies?”
Bashar al-Assad Izvestia Aug 2013 15min Permalink
A pivotal Civil Rights rally recalled, 50 years later.
An interview with Rick Rubin.
Andrew Romano Newsweek Jun 2013 20min Permalink
“In the past, when he has spoken, he has sometimes replied to questions by protesting that he is boring. Maybe he believes that this is the case, or just believes there is no point in allowing himself to seem interesting in the way interviewers usually want people to be. Still, he has told himself that tonight he will be truthful. He’s feeling calmer these days. He has not had one of these conversations for a while, and he intends it to be a long time before he has another.”
Chris Heath GQ Dec 2004 15min Permalink
An interview with the artchitects responsible for Stuttgart’s train station, Hamburg’s concert house and Berlin’s airport, three projects “currently competing to be seen as the country’s most disastrous.”
Der Spiegel Jun 2013 Permalink
"I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z."
Jon Caramanica New York Times Jun 2013 20min Permalink
An interview with T.J. Jackson Lears, historian of the “charlatans and hucksters of the Gilded Age, the cagey, conniving street peddlers of what we’d rather think was a premodern world.”
B. R. Cohen Public Books May 2013 15min Permalink
“I haven’t put out an album in 20 years. Let’s face it. I am an oldies act. I just don’t want it to be like when you watch Channel 13 and there’s the Delltones or some English band from the ’60s, and they’re real crotchety and they look terrible, and I go, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to be on that show.’”
Andrew Goldman, Billy Joel New York Times Magazine May 2013 20min Permalink
“No one works better out of anguish at all; that’s an incredible literary conceit.”
James Baldwin, Jordan Elgrably The Paris Review Apr 1984 35min Permalink
An interview with a blotto Lee Marvin.
Roger Ebert Esquire Oct 1970 15min Permalink
Reprints Arts Media Movies & TV
“Ebert: Sometimes we do really dislike each other.
Siskel: And sometimes we don’t.”
Lawrence Grobel Playboy Jan 1991 40min Permalink
“I never attacked anyone weak. Only bullies, secure in their courts, bureacracies, fifedoms.”
Alice Gregory The Believer Mar 2013 15min Permalink
An interview with the late writer.
Jerome Brooks The Paris Review Dec 1994 30min Permalink