Top 35 Janet Malcolm Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Janet Malcolm

2. “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

3. “Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us.”

— Janet Malcolm

4. “What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was ‘really like’ are not questions that torture us.”

— Janet Malcolm

5. “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

6. “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.”

— Janet Malcolm

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Janet Malcolm

10. “The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention.”

— Janet Malcolm

11. “Malice remains its animating impulse.”

— Janet Malcolm

12. “It is only by a great effort that we rouse ourselves to act, to fight, to struggle, to be heard above the wind, to crush flowers as we walk.”

— Janet Malcolm

13. “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

14. “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

15. “What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.”

— Janet Malcolm

16. “In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id.”

— Janet Malcolm

17. “The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe.”

— Janet Malcolm

18. “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

19. “The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”

— Janet Malcolm

20. “The therapy of psychoanalysis attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting that he lost somewhere along the way. It proposes to undermine the novelistic structures on which he has constructed his existence, and to destroy the web of elaborate, artful patterns in which he is caught.”

— Janet Malcolm

21. “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

22. “The Olwyn force wins only when the writer bows to its power and puts down his pen.”

— Janet Malcolm

23. “We lied to our parents and we lied to each other and we lied to ourselves, so addicted to deception had we become.”

— Janet Malcolm

24. “People tell journalists their stories as characters and dreams deliver their elliptical messages: without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them.”

— Janet Malcolm

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Janet Malcolm

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

— Janet Malcolm

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

— Janet Malcolm

30. “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

31. “Newspaper stories that were originally written to satisfy our daily hunger for idle and impersonal Schadenfreude – to excite and divert and be forgotten the next week – now take their place among serious sources of information and fact, and are treated as if they themselves were not simply raising the question of what happened and who is good and who is bad. I.”

— Janet Malcolm

32. “The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer’s head. They whispered, “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

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

— Janet Malcolm

34. “Theory and interpretation, far from threatening works of art, keep them alive.”

— Janet Malcolm

35. “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

36. “A correspondence is a kind of love affair.”

— Janet Malcolm