The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. —Mark Twain (in an essay recently published for the first time)
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Thanks for the link, Steve. Yet another reason to be impressed by Mr. Clemens.
There's a letter of Twain's in which he also writes about the interview (perhaps a testing of ideas for this essay?). He compares the problem of translating speech into print to using a "wagon on water," a phrase I've been trying to find a reason to borrow since reading it.