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.
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.
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.
photography responsibility unique
[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.
powerful cameras description
The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.
art always-trying interesting
I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.