Janet Malcolm Quotes

“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, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

“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, The Journalist and the Murderer

“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, The Journalist and the Murderer

“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, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Every hoodwinked widow, every deceived lover, every betrayed friend, every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, and remains in the relationship anyway, impelled by something stronger than his reason.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“It is all too natural for people who have been wronged or humiliated-- or feel they have been-- to harbor the fantasy that a writer will come along on a white steed and put everything to rights. As MacDonald v McGinniss illustrates, the writer who comes along is apt to only make things worse. 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 Malcom

“The writer, like a murderer, needs a motive.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes