Top 435 Interview Quotes

There was a telemarketing job one summer in high school that I was rejected for. I still walk by the building that I actually had the interview in. It’s still in New York, and I always think about that job and why I didn’t get it.

Pat Buchanan attacks me as ‘worshipping at the church of GDP.’ But in a CNBC ‘Kudlow and Company interview’, I reminded him that I also worship at the church of Catholic Mass, as do the vast majority of the Mexican immigrants.

In every interview, when they would ask me who should be a judge, I would always say Harry Connick, Jr., so I think I had something to do with him becoming a judge! He has a blunt, dry sense of humor. You never know if he’s joking or not, and I think that’s going to catch a lot of people by surprise.

It’s easier to get people to talk to you if you’re a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.

To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn’t mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you’re trying to get information that has not been written about before.

If an interview just serves the idea of celebrity, then I think that sucks. I don’t want to do that.

If I’m going to see people, I won’t wear heavy makeup. It’s not attractive on me. When you see those pictures on my Instagram, they are usually for when I’m doing a photo shoot or an interview.

If you take the fashion out of it, clothing has a lot of information – about how we feel about ourselves, how we’d like to feel about ourselves, and what we’d like to be: If you show up to an interview in sweatpants and a T-shirt, I’m going to deal with you in a really different way.

The literary interview won’t tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.

If you tell Canadians that you want to interview them for a critical piece on the Canadian healthcare system, they’ll put on their best trophy-wife smile for the camera and list its many accolades. Catch them on a day with their guard down in need of actual care, however, and the truth comes out.

The number one problem companies have during the Y Combinator interview is that a minute into the interview, we don’t know what they do. It’s the same problem with the application. You might think we’re experts, but you still have to explain it to us.

A presidential debate is a job interview. And voters look for certain traits in people applying to be president.

I think a first date is kind of like an interview. If I feel like we have chemistry, I will divulge more of myself to them.

The long, forensic interview really matters.

I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that.

In NASCAR, you can do a lot of banging around and get pretty serious and even get yourself upside down. All of those things can happen – and then you give an interview two seconds later.

There’s been a big buzz about the Charlatans in the last couple of years. I’ve heard the word Charlatans more in the last few years than I’d heard it for the previous 20 years. People would interview me for years and never even mention the Charlatans.

Line up a group of Horace Mann students, interview them, and take a look at their resumes, and you’ll be hard pressed to pick out the students who require extra time. So then, what qualifies these students to receive special accommodations on the SAT?

When I interview someone, I know in the first two minutes if I like them or not. I find that if it’s easy to talk to someone and I see an openness and honesty and integrity, then I usually hire them.

A few months into my research, General Petraeus, who was then leading Central Command, invited me to go for a run with him and his team along the Potomac River during one of his visits to Washington. I figured I could interview him while we ran.

I give people on my team the opportunity to excel as well, and I think that’s what continues to keep me ahead. I may not be able to show or do an interview; I give them the opportunity to run the show, and that has been working.

I want to live every moment totally and intensely. Even when I’m giving an interview or talking to people, that’s all that I’m thinking about.

Funnily enough, I had a real giggle with Gary Oldman when we were doing an interview together for ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.’ Because I joked I was probably the only British actor who wasn’t in the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise. The same is true of ‘Game of Thrones.’ Also ‘Star Wars.’

Treat everyone you meet during your interview with courtesy. Your interviewer could ask anyone for their opinion of you!

There are few things quite so effortlessly enjoyable as watching an eminent person getting in a huff and flouncing out of a television interview, often with microphone trailing.

I don’t try to be completely calculating in everything I say and do, but there’s no way I’m going to talk. There’s no reason to. And that’s why I’m such a boring interview, because I don’t go for the shock value, or smartass answers.

If you get too excited about any one interview, you’re making a mistake, because people do cancel.

When I first started doing press interviews, the big question was, ‘Do you think women are funny?’ People would ask you that in an interview. In an interview! It’s like, of course they are.

I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, ‘Impurity.’ Because that’s it.

The interview with Busted changed everything – it was just so funny, and we were all on set and they couldn’t stop laughing. And I remember thinking, ‘We’re onto something.’

I never think of access or good will. I just want a good interview. I want guests to be informative and entertaining. I’ve never been concerned about someone’s liking me tomorrow.

It is the little things that throw me – the wrong pen, the wrong font. An interview done standing up is a disaster. I need my knees to rest notes on.

If you interrupt somebody too early, if you miss it and don’t interrupt at all – that’s the difference between a good interview and a bad interview. It’s about the absolute moment.

I try to tell one lie in every interview. It keeps people I know amused when they read the article.

We’re not robots. There isn’t a perfect formula for an interview and there are days when you bring too much of you and there are days, quite honestly, when you don’t bring enough of you.

Interview With a Vampire’ is one of my favorite movies of all time. ‘Queen of the Damned,’ not so much one of my favorite movies, but it’s one of the best soundtracks of all time.

For the most part, if somebody approaches me and says, ‘I’d like to interview you,’ who am I to say no, when I spend all my days going, ‘Hello, you don’t know me. I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you have a little time?’

I remember, in my first interview after I arrived in Manchester, I said, ‘I didn’t come here to play in the Champions League – I have come to win it.’

Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up.

The newsprint thesp celebrity interview as a middle-brow art form suffers from desperate overproduction. There’ll be at least 10 in the broadsheets today and every Sunday hereafter.

I think hip-hop brought it on itself. When rappers got a chance to talk to the media, they would get in the interview and say, ‘It’s all real life.’ They play these characters, and then they can’t stop playing the character when they’re not working.

I did Robert Pattinson’s first live interview for ‘Twilight’ and he was so nervous.

When you interview at Google, they don’t tell you what the job is. You get hired for a pool and the reason they do it that way is they don’t want outsiders learning their secrets in the interview process.

I would love to interview Sean Spicer.

There aren’t that many actors with hair like this. And Amazon are casting Aragorn and they’re doing Interview with the Vampire’ on Hulu, so there’s all these good jobs.

I liked Art Linkletter’s way of conducting an interview while still keeping it light and I even admired Jack Bailey, host of ‘Queen for a Day.’ Particularly fascinating was how he could listen to all those awful tales of woe, then smile and slap someone on the back and declare her Queen for a Day.

My applications submitted to the Tribunal regarding my interview during the hunger strike were misinterpreted, and it was published in the press that I was going to offer defence, though in reality I was never willing to offer any defence.

There were so many people after that first ‘Colbert Report’ interview that were impressed by the synergy we had during the interview. People everywhere we’d go would say, ‘You should be the bandleader; it would be great for jazz. It would be great for the music.’ But I was completely against it.