Verbatim Interview Quotes

Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on “flow,” reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker’s response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim: “I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th – for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative – I don’t know what that means…. I just keep on plodding…. I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours – productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”8 A true Essentialist, Peter Drucker believed that “people are effective because they say no.

Heisenberg repeated his story about the German bomb program to anyone who would listen for the rest of his life. Goudsmit, who had access to the Farm Hall reports and had seen the pathetic remnants of the Nazi nuclear program firsthand, knew Heisenberg’s story was a fabrication. But, with the existence of the Farm Hall transcripts itself classified, Goudsmit could state only that Heisenberg was lying, without explaining how he knew. The first popular account of the Manhattan Project, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, written by the Swiss journalist Robert Jungk in 1958, repeated Heisenberg’s story almost verbatim. So did The Virus House, the first book dedicated solely to the history of the German bomb program, which relied heavily on interviews from Heisenberg and his fellow former Farm Hall detainees. (The author, David Irving, was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier.)

It may help you to jot down a few notes to alleviate any fear of becoming tongue-tied—your name, the position or company you are interested in, how you can be reached, any questions you may have. You won’t be reading it verbatim, but it may be comforting to refer back to it now and then as your conversation progresses. Know your message clearly. Have a plan for exactly what information you want to convey and what you intend to find out. It helps to visualize your success in the call beforehand, and if you feel anxious, to do relaxation exercises before you get on the phone. The importance of your image continues with any subsequent contact you make prior to the interview, such as your cover letter and resume.

Two essential principles of investigation came into play here. First, it is important to interview witnesses as soon after an incident as possible, in order to get the freshest possible memories of the events and to lock witnesses into their stories. Second, since guilty parties frequently coerce or persuade their friends to collaborate on a story, persons with potentially probative information are quickly split up and interviewed separately so that they can't agree on a common version of the story. Experienced detectives know that it is difficult to maintain a lie. If you didn't live it, it didn't happen, and therefore the details aren't hardwired into your mind. Liars have a hard time keeping a story straight, which is why subsequent versions are often verbatim recitations of the first telling, with very specific details offered to make the story seem truthful, while a truthful version may vary or be more vague. For this reason, it is important to lock in the details early and then keep pressure on suspected liars to see how they behave when telling their stories and how their stories hold up over time.

The creative process is imagination, memories, nightmares, and dismantling certain aspects of this world and putting them back together in the dark. Songs aren’t necessarily verbatim chronicles or necessarily journal entries, they’re like smoke, it’s like it’s made out of smoke. The stuff that makes a song … well, usually a song will remind you of something, it will take you back somewhere and make you think of somebody or someplace. They’re like touchstones, or a mist.

Several times a session—and we had twenty-one of them in the general—just as he had warned, Philippe-as-Trump would say something so outlandish, none of us could quite believe it. Then he’d tell us it was almost verbatim from a Trump rally, interview, or primary debate.

In Who Was That Masked Man?, David Rothel gives verbatim, often conflicting, interviews with people in key positions at the time of The Lone Ranger’s creation. And Dick Osgood, who worked 36 years at the Ranger’s birthplace, combines his experience with the accounts of his coworkers in Wyxie Wonderland: An Unauthorized 50–Year Diary of WXYZ, Detroit.