4 February 2019
Most writers when they are interviewed are waiting patiently and hopefully for the interview to end, particularly if it is on stage or TV. They/we will say virtually anything to speed the process along, out of a fear of boring a restless audience. As fiction writers blithely make things up, so we tend to "make things up" in an interview-more if it is live, perhaps less if it is written, like this one. An interview as a social occasion is inevitably prone to a certain degree of superficiality, like social chatter generally. Nothing much serious or profound or even sincere tends to be uttered in conversation.
