Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolm
Janet Malcolmis an American writer, journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, In the Freud Archivesand The Journalist and the Murderer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
photography responsibility unique
[The] arresting of time is photography's unique capacity, and the decision of when to click the shutter is the photographer's chief responsibility.
powerful cameras description
The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.
art always-trying interesting
I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always.
art reality odds
The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.
might burning photographer
There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work.
ashes analysis mouths
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.
trying patient form
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.
agreement hands order
Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.
loneliness stupid ignorance
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.
writing done states
Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness,