"[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."

12 likes

Source: Janet Malcolm (2011). “The Journalist And The Murderer”, p.147, Granta Books

About the author

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.

All quotes by Janet Malcolm →

Same author

More quotes by Janet Malcolm

See all →
Janet Malcolm Journalist, Author

"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."

Read quote
Janet Malcolm Journalist, Author

"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."

Read quote
Janet Malcolm Journalist, Author

"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."

Read quote
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."

Read quote
Janet Malcolm Journalist, Author

"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."

Read quote