It's unlikely that JM Coetzee and Rudyard Kipling have much else in common beyond their Nobel prizes, but one sentiment they certainly share is a loathing of being interviewed.

Coetzee once described the interview as "an exchange with a complete stranger, yet a stranger permitted by the conventions of the genre to cross the boundaries of what is proper in conversation between strangers". Kipling expressed it more succinctly: "No respectable man would ask it, much less give it."

How that eminent Edwardian would fare in today's publicity-driven culture is hard to imagine, though one suspects he would have played the PR game with the same gusto and wit he brought to everything else. That Coetzee, meanwhile, has resisted the clamour of press and admirers, not to mention his publishers, is a measure of the man, a writer who keeps his eye firmly on his work and not on the fripperies and impudencies that threaten to encroach on it.

Kipling's verdict will doubtless chime with many modern writers, but on the evidence of the world's plethora of book festivals, and the proliferation of authors in conversation in literary pages and airwaves, not all are as bashful about being quizzed about their work and themselves.

Indeed, a collection of author interviews by Australian broadcaster Ramona Koval published this month shows that some appear to thrive on it. Speaking Volumes: Conversations With Remarkable Writers (Scribe Publications, £14.99) is a series of transcriptions of interviews Koval conducted over several years. Some, as with Joseph Heller, were carried out in their own homes, but most were at book festivals, and Edinburgh International Book Festival in particular. As regulars to Charlotte Square will recall, for some years Koval presided over the big cats, wielding not a chair and a whip but feisty intelligence and dauntless confidence.

This recipe created some memorable occasions, not always for the right reasons. As she is the first to admit, in the introduction to this collection, public interviews can go terribly wrong ("you hold your breath, not sure if the next move will bring public humiliation or elated relief"). I certainly witnessed a few occasions where she and the author failed to establish a rapport and the event proceeded in a series of uncomfortable hiccups, like a record with a scratch.

That said, interviewing writers is an intimidating business, even when they are a private tete a tete. When it goes with a swing, however, the results can be fascinating, and it is good to be able to relive in these pages Harold Pinter's moving and spirited discussion of life after his diagnosis of throat cancer, or Gore Vidal speaking the month before 9/11 on how vulnerable America was to attack.

Vidal was a writer who could eat an interviewer in one gulp, and not even burp. In this encounter he again proves himself probably one of the most articulate literary figures of the 20th century, his flawless but pungent delivery utterly mesmerising. To be honest, he scarcely needed an interviewer, Koval's role more to set him off than interrogate him. The very thought.

Talking coherently or colourfully is not a gift all writers possess, and it's only since Kipling's time that is has become part of their required repertoire. I have interviewed renowned novelists or poets who were more nervous at the encounter than I was, who could barely make eye contact, or who made sure their publicist pre-warned me about the subjects I must on no account broach.

Some, however, talk as well as they write. One such is Kirsty Gunn, who is interviewed in today's edition of the Scottish Review of Books in The Herald.

Her responses are an object lesson in clarity and focus. Even when discussing her domestic life it is only to point up the dilemmas and tensions she must work around when writing. Unashamedly serious and literary, her reflections on the so-called experimental novel are not just fascinating but inspiring.

At its best, that's what a good interview does: illuminate the mind of the writer, and explain why they write as they do. Nothing else really matters.