In these more than twenty interviews dating from 1952 to the present, Bowles gives a variety of answers that reveal as much as they conceal. Too gracious to refuse interviews, he regards inquiries with the same clear-eyed detachment that marks his prose, wondering, "Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways." Despite his reticence, Bowles frankly discusses his "unconscious" writing practice, his views on the "illiterate imagination," existentialism, his various experiments with altered states of consciousness, and nearly fifty years of expatriate life in Morocco.

Included are three interviews never before published, several interviews that originally appeared in now obscure journals, plus interviews by Jay Mclnerny for Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Bailey for The Paris Review, and Michael Rogers for Rolling Stone.