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

:::

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

:::

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.
~ Janet Malcolm

:::

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

:::

Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us.
~ Janet Malcolm

:::

Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie.
~ Janet Malcolm

:::

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

:::

What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self absorption and the journalist’s skepticism.
~ Janet Malcolm

:::

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
~ Janet Malcolm

:::

Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy-that the established contemporary artists must also be frauds- is a necessary corollary.
~ Janet Malcolm

:::