91 Quotes by Janet Malcolm

'The Rachel Maddow Show' is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest.

Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes.

The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting.

Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.

The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.

The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.