Janet Malcolm Quotes

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

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.

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.

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

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

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

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

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.

Malice remains its animating impulse.

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

The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.

If you scratch a great photograph you find two things: a painting and a photograph.