Janet Malcolm Quotes

May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.

I wouldn't like to be that famous, I value my privacy. Mind you, Miss Piggy enjoys every moment of it. If it were not for me, she would spend all her time in the limelight.

I'm trying my best to keep my private life guarded. It's not easy at all. Non, non, non.

I never felt terribly comfortable in the public eye.

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

I will leave no memoirs.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

I just want everybody to know that I'm opposed to an unauthorized biography on anybody.

I don't enjoy being recognised. It's unpleasant.

I was going to write an autobiography once. I started writing it, and then I thought, 'No, let them dig around when I'm dead.'

I did everything I could to remain anonymous for as long as possible.

I was famous in a way that was kind of terrifying. I had no protection. When reporters showed up at my house, there wasn't even a sidewalk. They were literally parked on my front lawn.

The intimate and meditative form that Plutarch became known for was completely new in his day.

Our Grub-street biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers on purpose to make a penny of him.

For better or worse we live in a very exposing [time] where, if you choose to, everyone can see everyone's business. You see what they're having for breakfast, where they are, what they're doing. Whereas I think that classic idea of mystery is very seductive. Not knowing every single thing about a person, what they're thinking, that's very powerful. And it would be a shame if we lost that totally.

It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.

Alot of peo­ple think our lives are all about tak­ing pic­tures and stuff like that. But it becomes a real bother when they're tak­ing pic­tures of you all the time.

What the reporters are like! They are mad with excitement at the thought of my approaching demise. Kind Sister Farquhar, my nurse, spends much of her time in throwing them downstairs. But one got in the other day, and asked me if I mind the fact that I must die.

It's great to have people come out. I do worry, though. They know me very intimately, in a way, if they listen to my show; they know a lot about me.

But think of how much worse it would be to sit here, not knowing. Until the Dead choke the Ratterlin and Hedge walks across the dry bed of the river to batter down the door.

There's nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation.

Dead men tell no tales.

Much as I admire Tolkien, I once again always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, "Fly, you fools." What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.