David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews, with Lewis Frumkes (August 1999)

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TL;DR

Radio interview on the Brief Interviews tour with substantial IJ retrospection at three years' distance: Orin as "a transplanted hideous man," the Orin/Nero anagram question (denied), IJ as a book about an America drowning in information it must somehow digest, and the most quotable version of his advice to young writers — learn to love the fear, abide in the fear. Also good origin-story biography (Amherst, the agent list, the lucky mid-80s young-author market). ASR transcript, moderately noisy; speech is paraphrase throughout, short coinages excepted.

Key claims

Orin ↔ BIWHM continuity: Orin is, he says, essentially a transplanted hideous man — the interviewed males' postures and verbal styles echo Orin Incandenza's more than anyone's. BIWHM was partly motivated by trusted readers pointing out he'd never written about sex or love stories, and that the gap made him uncomfortable.
The Nero question: asked whether Orin backwards spelling (near-)Nero is significant — he thinks not; he planted reversible names in early work and dropped the habit once it clearly interested him more than readers.
IJ's subject, 1999 formulation: the book was in some ways meant to be about America as it is coming to seem — much of that being information, the challenge of digesting it in enormous quantities and forming patterns and meaning out of it.
Difficulty and audience: the book was designed to require work — its reader needs a liberal-arts grounding and a genuine appetite for reading; his stated greatest hope was merely that the publisher would earn back the advance. Little, Brown somehow made extreme length and extreme difficulty seem sexy as marketing — which he still can't explain.
Attention vs. affection: the book gets plenty of attention, but attention and affection are different things, and anything held up high gets its feelings hurt. His protection: a knack for dissociation, being deep into other work a year before publication, and prior low-attention books. First-book fame would be "death" — you'd instantly feel bound to duplicate the experience.
Writing advice (to students and letter-writers): students must learn that the reader's time and attention are a precious commodity the writer asks for and has to earn; he's "mean" until they try things they can't do. To civilians asking for the secret technique: there is none — learn to love the fear, which will be a lifelong companion; the secret is not escaping the fear but abiding in it.
Work habits: "I am a sperm cell" — no routine; floundering produces "draconian" fake schedules; when the work goes, it takes no effort, and the discipline turns out to be tolerating time away from it.
Origins: mediocre high school → Amherst; a senior-year reading group (Latin Americans, Puig especially, Donoso, Barthelme, Barth's Giles Goat Boy) "made my heart beat fast" in a way Ulysses didn't; a joke list of agents at a grad-school party got him Bonnie Nadell, who pitched Broom partly on the kid being only 22 in the post-McInerney/Ellis youth market.
Favorite-word tic: he wears words out the way radio listeners wear out favorite songs; in Broom, by his own count, "troubled" recurs on the order of a hundred instances across five hundred pages.
Reading now: can't read fiction for pleasure anymore (ego involvement: sneer or despair); poetry is the one thing left he reads purely for fun — it lets him "be kind of a kid again."

Themes

Fame/attention (attention ≠ affection; dissociation as coping); information overload as IJ's subject; hideousness and sexuality (Orin, BIWHM); craft pedagogy and fear; biography (Amherst, Nadell, the 80s market).

Cross-references

McCaffery interview: earn-the-reader's-attention is the seduction argument; the fear material extends McCaffery's "warm full feeling" / risk talk.
Lipsky: attention-vs-affection and the handling-fame self-monitoring, in tour-tape form.
Charlie Rose 1997: same dissociation claim ("I dissociate very well").
The Unfinished: corroborating biography (Nadell, Amherst, the early success).
IJ connections: Orin's seduction-and-contempt M.O. (the Moms, Subjects); information-glut as O.N.A.N.-era condition (InterLace menus, the filmography); Hal's attention economics.

Notable moments (paraphrase)

Orin as a transplanted hideous man.
IJ as the challenge of digesting enormous quantities of information into pattern and meaning.
Attention and affection are not the same thing.
Learn to love the fear; the secret is abiding in it.
The work-habits confession that he is, God's honest truth, a sperm cell.