Jeffrey Macdonald Quotes

“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

“I have read a little of the material he has sent-- trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports... I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from this material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower- it all depends on how you read the evidence.”
― 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