JANET MALCOLM

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

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

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.

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. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

I don't go out of my way to be friendly, because it's completely unnecessary. People tell you what they are going to tell you no matter what.

As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.

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

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.

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