Saturday, December 18, 2010

Michael Crichton Appearance on Larry King Live



This week Larry King retired after hosting his CNN show Larry King Live for 25 years.

Michael Crichton appeared on the program on September 22, 1995. Here’s one of the many highlights from the transcript (sorry, no link, obtained from Lexis Nexis):

LARRY KING: Do you have a personal favorite?

MICHAEL CRICHTON: Of?

LARRY KING: All your works, everything you've done.

MICHAEL CRICHTON: No.

LARRY KING: Let's say a culture came and said 'Show us something of yours.'

MICHAEL CRICHTON: I think I would show them a book called Travels that was sort of autobiographical.

LARRY KING: The least known of your books, maybe?

MICHAEL CRICHTON: Probably. Yeah.


Crichton was asked a similar question by Charlie Rose:

ROSE: Of all the things you have done, what has brought you the most psychic income, satisfaction?

CRICHTON: Whatever is really difficult.

ROSE: The more difficult, the more pleasure?

CRICHTON: Yes, more -- it was very difficult for me to do a book 20 years ago called "Travels" that was -- because it was about myself and I don’t like to talk about myself.

ROSE: I liked it actually.

CRICHTON: Thank you. And I am trying to do another one.


Travels is by far my favorite of Michael Crichton’s works. As I wrote in an earlier post, Crichton himself, during an online discussion, told me he was working on a sequel. Let’s hope we’ll see that published someday.


2 comments:

(M)ary said...

I am reading Michael Crichton's Travels and it is amazing.
In the book, he speaks of the idea that we humans manifest our health problems sometimes. He says a lot about diseases and death in the book which I find spooky considering his untimely end.

I am trying to figure out if he wrote anything closer to the time of his death which wraps up or contradicts his thoughts expressed in Travels. I wonder, how did he process the experience of having cancer and did it change or stregthen his ideas about disease?

Marla Warren said...

Michael Crichton was very private about his struggle with cancer. After Crichton’s death, Dennis Miller recounted on his radio show that he had had dinner with Michael Crichton just a month before, and had no idea that he was ill.

The last thing Crichton wrote concerning medicine (that I’ve been able to find) is a book review of How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman:

Where Does It Hurt?
By Michael Crichton, New York Times, April 1, 2007

Perhaps if the sequel to Travels is published someday, it will contain more insight into Crichton’s views.

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