Janet Malcolm quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Janet Malcolm on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness,

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.

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

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.

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

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

The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive,

[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 writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own.

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

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

Malice remains its animating impulse.