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I learned that I never really know the true story of my guests' lives, that I have to content myself with knowing that when I'm interviewing somebody, I'm getting a combination of fact and truth and self-mythology and self-delusion and selective memory and faulty memory.

When I was there, something clicked in my head; I found myself interviewing people, searching out facts and figures. Later on I became much more self-conscious of what I was doing.

The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don't know: young civil rights leaders in the South, showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of night. A doctor working for 'Doctors Without Borders' in Somalia, operating by kerosene light in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions, but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic, so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly, it would be a kind of defence.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.

I sometimes find that in interviews you learn more about yourself than the person learned about you.

'Tell me about yourself.' When interviewers ask this, they don't want to hear about everything that has happened in your life; the interviewer's objective is to see how you respond to this vague yet personal question.

If people want to really know what's up with me then they can read one of my interviews.