Top 48 Quotes & Sayings by Janet Malcolm
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Janet Malcolm.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.
The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.
The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.
I think of myself as more of a maker than a thinker.
The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.
You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting.
The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.
I don't go out of my way to be friendly, because it's completely unnecessary. People tell you what they are going to tell you no matter what.
People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.
The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen.
The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.
The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
I'm a very laboured writer. I hammer it out sentence by sentence, and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.
Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.
Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes.
Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but, in fact, childish trust and impetuosity are far more common.
Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.
I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.
Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.
'The Rachel Maddow Show' is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest.
Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.
If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.
If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
[Y]ou never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don't get caught, because if you are caught no one or no one who has any sense will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.
The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.
[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.
Malice remains its animating impulse.
There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.
Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.
This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.
The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.
I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.
Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.
The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.
Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.
The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.
All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.
[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment.
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