Janet Malcolm

“To be a biographer is to be a voyeur.”

“Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.”

“We are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives.”

“Art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.”

“Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world.”

“A writer is someone who has found a process that will perfectly accompany his life.”

“The journalistic encounter is a fundamentally asymmetrical one.”

“The cat is out of the bag and will not go back in.”

“The 'I' of the writer is a grammatical convenience, not a biographical reality.”

“What we call 'morality' is simply blind obedience to words of command.”

“The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive.”

“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.”