If you haven't yet discovered The Paris Review interview archive, you're in for an incredible treat. From the 1950s forward, here they all are, a diamond necklace of discussions with some of the most gifted, most admired, most cantankerous writers of the last 60 years -- novelists, biographers, essayists, poets. Poets all. 

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."--William Styron, Interview, Writers at Work: First Series (1958)

On the Paris Review website, the Styron interview is referenced as having taken place in 1954 (the 1958 reference above indicates a later published collection). Along with Styron, to name a few, there's Graham Greene, Ralph Ellison, Isak Dinesen, Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway seemed particularly disdainful of the interview process, stubbornly chiding George Plimpton for asking "old, tired questions." Hemingway's responses are often understandably, but disappointingly, as clipped as the dialogue in his short stories.

In later years, you'll find John Dos Passos. Maya Angelou. John Cheever. Pablo Neruda. A.S. Byatt. Margaret Atwood. Margaret Drabble. T.C. Boyle. Umberto Eco.

The questions progress from a rather hesitant tone (perhaps they were edited?) to a more directly personal, charged character that some might call intrusive. You'll find more questions about the writing process itself, and writing habits, topics many authors are hesitant to articulate, as Hemingway famously was: do writers consciously consider plot, do the characters really take over the reins (Cheever's response to this is hilarious), how does a writer know when he/she is done, personal questions about the moment they realized they would be a writer and when they told their families, as if wanting to write were a sin requiring confession to one's parents. Journalism students might be interested to note the different interview styles across the decades.

The link below will take you to the 1950s interviews, which are available in full -- just follow the tabs to the others, many of which are excerpted. You're sure to make discoveries here. Most libraries are likely to have some access to these brief moments of literary history through subscriptions or archival records. 

So if you're feeling solitary and unloved as a writer, laugh and cry a few tears over these treasures and understand you're not alone.    

http://www.theparisreview.org/literature.php/prmDecade/1950

Quote from THE INTERNATIONAL THESAURUS OF QUOTATIONS (compiled by Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall De Bruhl)