Janet Malcolm Quotes

Today, journalists more than any other cohort of professionals, are responsible for the confusion that surrounds power and its criminality in contemporary society. As Janet Malcolm said in another context, '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.' ~ Martin Walker

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. ~ Janet Malcolm

Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly. ~ Janet Malcolm

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive, ~ Janet Malcolm

The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them. ~ Janet Malcolm

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. ~ Janet Malcolm

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. ~ Janet Malcolm

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

Malice remains its animating impulse. ~ Janet Malcolm

The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention. ~ Janet Malcolm

He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism. ~ Janet Malcolm

As you no doubt gathered, I do not devote the care to word selection and organization in my letters that I do in my books Generally, I don't write letters at all ... Writing, for me, is work, and I do not like to do my work carelessly, but if I waited until I got a letter into the shape I'd be happy with, you would never hear another word from me and would think I had perished on a mountain ... ~ Janet Malcolm

All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs. ~ Janet Malcolm

Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy-that the established contemporary artists must also be frauds- is a necessary corollary ~ Janet Malcolm

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. ~ Janet Malcolm

Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. ~ Janet Malcolm

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

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life," Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article. But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not "own" the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed.
The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody's business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public's inviolable right to be diverted and an individual's wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world's careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse. ~ Janet Malcolm

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always. ~ Janet Malcolm

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy. ~ Janet Malcolm

Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn't know how to lie. ~ Janet Malcolm

[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility. ~ Janet Malcolm

A fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called "stories"), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. "Second stepsister not so bad after all" is not a good story. ~ Janet Malcolm

The freedom to be cruel is one of journalism's uncontested privileges, and the rendering of subjects as if they were characters in bad novels is one of its widely accepted conventions. ~ Janet Malcolm

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

A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence. ~ Janet Malcolm

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets
these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. ~ Janet Malcolm

The writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own. ~ Janet Malcolm

The heavy odds against finding the desired ... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search. ~ Janet Malcolm

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. ~ Janet Malcolm

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. ~ Janet Malcolm

Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. ~ 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. ~ Janet Malcolm

She was my life raft, my turtle. ~ Janet Fitch

Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative. ~ Janet Morris

Until the day I die, or until the day I can't think anymore, I want to be involved in the issues that I care about. ~ Janet Reno

War is all and king of all ~ Janet Morris

I've always thought if you watch the performance and you don't know about the person, then you only see the performance. ~ Janet McTeer

I wanted to be esteemed by the cognoscenti."
Josie heard her father in her head, See, I told you. She's laughin at you. "Sorry for being so ignorant, but is that a yes or a no?"
The dreamy look in Meredith's eyes dissolved, and the focused intelligence, self-conscious, returned. "By a special few. Those in the know. Cogno meaning recognition-cogitato, to think. ~ Janet Fitch

My mother slapped her forehead and rolled her eyes. Stephanie, Stephanie, Stephanie, what are you thinking of? This is no kind of work for a nice young lady. ~ Janet Evanovich

At EMILY's List, we're in the business of expanding the political power of women. ~ Ellen Malcolm

I tried to say beware the room is laid with traps and hung with hooks. ~ Janet Frame

If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The same rebellion, the same impatience, the same anger that exists in the hearts of the dark people in Africa and Asia is existing in the hearts and minds of 20 million black people in this country who have been just as thoroughly colonized as the people in Africa and Asia. ~ Malcolm X

Sometimes I think my own brain might be a bitch whose sole purpose is to make me feel shitty. To quote Malcolm from Malcolm in the Middle, "Why won't my brain let me be happy? ~ L. H. Cosway

Wisdom, Niko thought as he leaned his cheek against his long-handled rake, cannot be had without price. And that price is blood. The sound of it in your veins. The pound of it in your head. The volume of it in a human body; the sickness when you've spilled it. ~ Janet Morris

All sorts of spiritual gifts come through privations, if they are accepted. ~ Janet Erskine Stuart

All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we're deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We're taking Forest to the police station, and then I'm taking the minions home with me. I'll stash them in my apartment until someone springs Forest. They haven't put the carpet down yet, and Briggs is there to babysit. ~ Janet Evanovich

You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano? ~ Malcolm Gladwell

Governments enjoying surpluses have a very strong temptation to splash money around, and while tax cuts are always appealing, cutting taxes at the top of a boom runs the real risk of creating a structural deficit when the boom subsides. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting. ~ Janet Flanner

People involved in a revolution don't become part of the system; they destroy the system ... The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them ... ~ Malcolm X

The top people of the biggest companies are, surprisingly, often the nicest ones in their company I'm not sure, though, if they got there because they were good guys or that they're now good guys because they can afford to be. ~ Malcolm Forbes

They explained about the epidurals and drugs, but no one there was going to have drugs. They all wanted the natural experience. It all seemed wrapped in plastic, unreal, like stewardesses on planes demonstrating the seat belts and the patterns for orderly disembarkatation in case of a crash at sea, the people taking a glance at the cards in the seat pocket in front of them. Sure, they thought, no problem. A peek at the nearest exit and then they were ready for in-flight service, peanuts and a movie. ~ Janet Fitch

Too old for what?" I demanded. "Fun?" I ~ Janet Sumner Johnson

Success has to do with deliberate practice. Practice must be focused, determined, and in an environment where there's feedback. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I plunked down on the couch beside him.

"I don't have any accomplishments of any kind. I'm stupid and boring. I don't have any hobbies. I don't play sports. I don't write poetry. I don't travel to interesting places. I don't even have a good job."

"That doesn't make you stupid and boring," Morelli said.

"Well, I feel stupid and boring. And I wanted to feel interesting. And somehow, someone told my mother and grandmother that I played the cello. I guess it was me...only it was like some foreign entity took possession of my body. I heard the words coming out of my mouth, but I'm sure they originated in some other brain. And it was so simple at first. One small mention. And then it took on a life of it's own. And next thing, everyone knew."

"And you can't play the cello."

"I'm not even sure this is a cello."

Morelli went back to smiling. "And you think you're boring? No way, Cupcake."

"What about the stupid part?"

Morelli threw his arm around me. "Sometimes that's a tough call. ~ Janet Evanovich

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

As a child, I had to get up early for school or work. I'd get ready by myself. I'd set my alarm to wake me up very early in the morning, and be off to work, the family driver driving me every morning. I did it alone, my parents never coming in to wake me up. ~ Janet Jackson

I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation's history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity. ~ Janet Yellen

I'm underrealized," Lula said. "I gotta lot of untapped potential. Yesterday my horoscope said I gotta expand my horizons." "You expand any more in that dress, and you'll get yourself arrested," Connie said.
Twelve Sharp ~ Janet Evanovich

When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We think we learn by growing a plant but we can't know if it's just surviving or truly living? We really don't know anything about a plant until we kill it. ~ Janet Macunovich

You don't know. You've never been married and divorced. Everything is insurmountable when you're married. The fact that you want to talk at the breakfast table and he insists on reading his paper is insurmountable. Leaving the seat up on the toilet is insurmountable. Getting peanut butter in the jelly jar is insurmountable. People don't change just because they're married. All those little habits and personality quirks that you previously thought were trivial become the bane of your existence. And the major problems, like different outlooks on life, are crushing. ~ Janet Evanovich

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated. ~ Janet Fitch

We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration. ... The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I'm no expert. I have no psychic powers, and I sure don't possess any secret wisdom. I'm just Janet. I have strengths, weaknesses, fears, happiness, sadness. I experience joy and I experience pain. I'm highly emotional. I'm very vulnerable. ~ Janet Jackson

Riley reminded herself that she was a professional, and stabbing Emerson with her nail file wouldn't be appropriate. ~ Janet Evanovich