Biography Quote by Janet Malcolm

“The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.” quote by Janet Malcolm — Download Open image

“The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.”

Janet Malcolm

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

Janet Malcolm

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

Janet Malcolm

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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

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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

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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

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

Janet Malcolm

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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

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“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

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People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.

Janet Malcolm

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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

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

Janet Malcolm

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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

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I have my own biography of Gram Parsons - I don't want to be part of somebody else's.

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“If you can choose your way into a cage, you can choose your way out.”

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All Philosophy is Biography

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I've read every Madonna biography. I've also looked up every pop star to see how they first made it. The biggest thing I learnt…

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I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is…

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“What drove us crazy wasn't necessarily the sexual freedom his critic claimed he was unleashing, but freedom, period. Freedom to be yourself, to express…

Joel Spector Larry Geller Patricia Romanowski

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“Maybe he'd never come acrross anybody as well versed at objectifying body parts as I was. In my defense, this was an occupational hazard;…

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It's time for male leaders to not only ask for binders of qualified women, but to re-write the definition of 'qualified.' The best man…

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“Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the…

Tony Wilson

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I think that I'm busy in the present, and I don't want to go back. Well, there's been an unauthorized biography, and you can't…

Albert Finney

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“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably…

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History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.

Alphonse de Lamartine

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Biography Quote by Janet Malcolm

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