A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
“Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us.” — 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… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s… — 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,… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
“I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life," Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
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… — Janet Malcolm Copy Share Image
“Life, of course, never gets anyone's entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our… — 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
