91 Quotes by Janet Malcolm

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

Maddow is widely praised for the atmosphere of cheerful civility and accessible braininess that surrounds her stage persona'.

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.

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.

Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.

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.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive,

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.