"The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is."

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Source: Janet Malcolm (1981). “Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography”

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Janet Malcolm

Journalist, Author

Janet Malcolm was a renowned journalist and author known for her critical insights into the ethics of journalism and the nature of truth.

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"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."

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"[Y]ou never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don't get caught, because if you are caught no one or no one who has any sense will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself."

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"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."

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Janet Malcolm Journalist, Author

"A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence."

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