Quotes by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm

[Richard Avedon’s] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people’s faces – on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment.

Disappointment

Eye

Wrinkles

[The] arresting of time is photography’s unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer’s chief responsibility.

Photography

Responsibility

Unique

[Y]ou never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don’t get caught, because if you are caught no one or no one who has any sense will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.

Benefits

Done

Hypocrisy

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.

Law

Ordinary

War

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.

Analysis

Ashes

Mouths

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.

Analysts

Patient

Trying

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.

Taken

Thinking

Views

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.

Betrayal

Loneliness

Trust

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

Characteristics

Fidelity

Way

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

Always Trying

Art

Interesting

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Agreement

Always Trying

Analysis

Analysts

Armed Robbery

Art

Ashes

Beach

Benefits

Betrayal

Burning

Cameras

Character

Characteristics

Description

Disappointment

Done

Earning

Eye

Fidelity

Freedom Of Speech

Giving

Greek

Grieving

Hands

Heart

Hypocrisy

Ideas

Impulse

Interesting

Invention

Journalism

Law

Loneliness

Malice

Might

Mother

Motive

Mouths

Murderer

Needs

Novelists

Odds

Order

Ordinary

Patient

Photographer

Photography

Powerful

Reality

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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The Autobiography

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The Relationship Therapist

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Quotes by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm

[The] arresting of time is photography’s unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer’s chief responsibility.

[Y]ou never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don’t get caught, because if you are caught no one or no one who has any sense will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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Topics by Janet Malcolm

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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