Janet Malcolm Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

Janet Malcolm
If you scratch a great photograph, you will find two things: a painting and a photograph.

Janet Malcolm
Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wound.... The analyst... keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.

Janet Malcolm
A burglar at the subject's keyhole, shamelessly marketing voyeuristic delights.

Janet Malcolm
The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

Janet Malcolm
There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

Janet Malcolm
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
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.

Janet Malcolm
I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project.

Janet Malcolm
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.

Janet Malcolm
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.

Janet Malcolm
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.

Janet Malcolm
Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person's profound irrationality.

Janet Malcolm
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.

Janet Malcolm
Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

Janet Malcolm
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.

Janet Malcolm
The realities of characters in fiction — and of their cousins in journalism — derives precisely from the bold, almost childlike strokes from which they are drawn.

Janet Malcolm