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. — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
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… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is. — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
“The writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own.” — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
“The subject of a piece of writing has not suffered the tension and anxiety endured by the subject of the "Eichmann experiment" (as it… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others. — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
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… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
