A Quote by Janet Malcolm

Quote Topics

Beach Deep Dominant Dyed Exposure His Journalist Most Novelist Robe Self Shore Stands Trait Trembling Water

Quote Author

Janet Malcolm
American - Writer
Born: 1934

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.

Janet Malcolm

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

Errol Morris

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

Philip Wylie

Assange is not a 'journalist' any more than the 'editor' of al-Qaeda's new English-language magazine 'Inspire' is a 'journalist.' He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.

Sarah Palin

The man who wears the yellow-dyed robe but is not free from stains himself, without self-restraint and integrity, is unworthy of the robe.

Gautama Buddha

The one thing that shaped my life was when I was 15 or 16: I knew I wanted to be a journalist. And not just a journalist, but a journalist in the Middle East, and to go back to the Arab world and try to understand what it meant to be Lebanese.

Anthony Shadid

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Norman Mailer

I think we're all actors. There's this friend of mine who's a great drummer, and he said, "I never thought I'd be a drummer, but I got really good at it. I always feel like I'm an actor playing the drums." His real calling was that he was going to be a magician. That's what he felt like he wanted to do. If you decide to act like a journalist, you'll probably be a better journalist than just being a journalist. What you're doing is, you're taking the executive role and stepping outside yourself so that you're able to make more objective decisions.

Matt Dillon

If anybody ever tries to do an investigative report on a journalist, much like the kind and the way a journalist would do on a public figure, have you ever seen a stuck pig? Because that's what the journalist looks like.

Rush Limbaugh

I am old enough to think the word 'journalist' is not all that noble a designation. Journalist - that record keeper, quote taker and processor of press releases - was, in the world of letters I grew up in, a lower-down job. To be a writer - once the ambition of every journalist - was to be the greater truth teller.

Michael Wolff

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

Lena Dunham

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

Pete Hamill

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.