It is great not required of the writer in these interviews that he be and wise. We all know, we readers of contemporary literature, that our novelists and poets do not live better than we do. What is required is that the writer be gifted, which ever since the Romantic period has meant vividness, a heightened degree of involvement with himself, a sense of his particular gift or daemon. When we interview a gifted, vivid, intense, highly charged modern writer, we are really saying: What does it feel like to be this gifted? What's it like, day after day, living with a gift like yours? [...]