American - Writer | 1934 -
You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting.
Janet Malcolm
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Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections, and other data.
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Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes.
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The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.
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The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.
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The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.
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Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
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I don't go out of my way to be friendly, because it's completely unnecessary. People tell you what they are going to tell you no matter what.
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I'm a very laboured writer. I hammer it out sentence by sentence, and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.
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If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.
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As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.
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People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.
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