91 Quotes by Janet Malcolm

The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention.

Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us.

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

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.

Creative work in any established system of thought takes place at the boundaries of the system, where its powers of explanation are least developed and its vulnerability to outside attack is most marked.

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.

The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe.

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.

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