91 Quotes by Janet Malcolm

It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk.

Newspaper stories that were originally written to satisfy our daily hunger for idle and impersonal Schadenfreude – to excite and divert and be forgotten the next week – now take their place among serious sources of information and fact, and are treated as if they themselves were not simply raising the question of what happened and who is good and who is bad. I.

Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.

Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses – the days of interviews – are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.

The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer’s head. They whispered, “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.

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.

In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id.

Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain of appearances, has chosen as her uniform.

The Olwyn force wins only when the writer bows to its power and puts down his pen.