Books Quote by Janet Malcolm

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

— Janet Malcolm

“The writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own.”

— Janet Malcolm

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

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

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

I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.

— Janet Malcolm

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

“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

People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.

— 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…

— Janet Malcolm

The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.

— 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…

— Janet Malcolm