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…

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