Alex Belth interviews Gay Talese about his 1964 Esquire profile of boxer Floyd Patterson, including how the writer worked with the fighter to make his quotes perfect: "I said, 'Floyd, what’s it like being knocked out?' Then he started talking and I said, 'Wait a minute, you can do better than this. Tell me again.' And we’d go deeper, deeper, deeper. The quotations that [are in the story] are not what I first got — they are what I got after I badgered the guy."
February 7, 2016