The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography's status as a popular genre.
Janet Malcolm
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.
Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but, in fact, childish trust and impetuosity are far more common.
The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.
I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.
If I write a page a day, I feel very good about it.
People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.
I think of myself as more of a maker than a thinker.
The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
'The Rachel Maddow Show' is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest.
Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.
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.
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.
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen.
The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.
Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.
The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
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.
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.
The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.
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.
The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.
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.
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.
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.
My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.
