Janet Malcolm Quotes
12 quotes
in 264 categories
-
Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
-
Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness,
-
Malice remains its animating impulse.
-
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 writer, like the murderer, needs a motive,
-
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…
-
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…
-
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
-
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.…
-
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.
-
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…
Browse Janet Malcolm Quotes by Category