Top 30 Janet Malcolm Quotes
#1. Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness,
Janet Malcolm
#2. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil - it is merely a restatement of the mystery - and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force.
Janet Malcolm
#3. All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.
Janet Malcolm
#4. Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
Janet Malcolm
#6. Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm
#7. 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 least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
Janet Malcolm
#8. The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.
Janet Malcolm
#9. The writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own.
Janet Malcolm
#10. What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
Janet Malcolm
#11. Listen to me, not to her. I am authentic. I speak with authority. Go to the full texts of the journals, the letters home, and the rest. They will tell you what you want to know.
Janet Malcolm
#12. What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.
Janet Malcolm
#13. The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive,
Janet Malcolm
#14. There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.
Janet Malcolm
#15. The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.
Janet Malcolm
#16. He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.
Janet Malcolm
#17. Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy-that the established contemporary artists must also be frauds- is a necessary corollary
Janet Malcolm
#18. A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.
Janet Malcolm
#19. If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
Janet Malcolm
#20. [The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.
Janet Malcolm
#21. [David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.
Janet Malcolm
#22. I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.
Janet Malcolm
#23. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them.
Janet Malcolm
#24. 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. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly.
Janet Malcolm
#25. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language.
Janet Malcolm
#26. Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
Janet Malcolm
#27. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe.
Janet Malcolm
#28. 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.
Janet Malcolm
#29. Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other's side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.
Janet Malcolm
#30. The heavy odds against finding the desired ... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.
Janet Malcolm
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