Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolmis an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, In the Freud Archivesand The Journalist and the Murderer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
mother art armed-robbery
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.
way fidelity characteristics
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
beach grieving self
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 trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
photography two scratches
If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
character ideas greek
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 writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
needs motive murderer
The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive,
art freedom-of-speech way
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.
impulse malice remains
Malice remains its animating impulse.
heart giving resistance
Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
hypocrisy done benefits
[Y]ou never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don't get caught, because if you are caught no one or no one who has any sense will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.
war law ordinary
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.
taken thinking views
Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.
character journalism invention
The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.
disappointment eye wrinkles
[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment.