Janet Malcolm

“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.”

“Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but, in fact, childish trust and impetuosity are far more common.”

“I'm a very laboured writer. I hammer it out sentence by sentence, and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.”

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

“Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

“The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.”

“I think of myself as more of a maker than a thinker.”

“The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.”

“If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.”

“[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.”

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

“My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen.”

“The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.”

“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 cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.”

“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.”