Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses – the days of interviews – are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife. Janet Malcolm
Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
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Charles Bukowski
I imagined it was far better to be optimistic, to proceed assuming wherever you could that you had cared enough, that you'd made a difference, that you would again. Dwelling on the worst was no way to live.
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Gwenda Bond
I had an interview once with some German journalist–some horrible, ugly woman. It was in the early days after the communists–maybe a week after–and she wore a yellow sweater that was kind of see-through. She had huge tits and a huge black bra, and she...
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Karl Lagerfeld
The death of a billionaire is worth more to the media than the lives of a billion poor people.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from war. Fucking Baghdad.
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Michael Hastings
More Quotes By Janet Malcolm
[David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood.
The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil–it is merely a restatement of the mystery–and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its...
Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life....
He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.
Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards...
