Life & Wisdom Quote by Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm’s line lands like a scalpel disguised as a style note. “Fidelity” sounds pious, almost legalistic, but she sharpens it by specifying what journalists are actually obliged to honor: not just what a source meant, but how they meant it. The “subject’s thought” is the interior architecture; the “characteristic way of expressing himself” is the visible facade. Quote one without the other and you can technically be accurate while functionally lying.

The phrase “sine qua non” is doing quiet work here. It’s Latin courtroom gravity dropped into a profession that often treats quotation as a decorative flourish or a gotcha. Malcolm is insisting quotation isn’t transcription-as-trophy; it’s representation under constraints. That’s also the subtext: journalists routinely violate this rule while congratulating themselves for using quotation marks as moral armor. The marks don’t guarantee fairness; they just signal that you’re about to outsource authority.

Context matters because Malcolm spent a career probing the ethics and power asymmetries of reportage, especially the way writers can ventriloquize subjects while pretending neutrality. Her emphasis on “characteristic” speech reads like a warning against the common editorial temptation to “clean up” a source into respectability or, worse, to select only the clumsiest phrase to imply stupidity, evasiveness, guilt. A quote can be a portrait or a mugshot; the difference is rarely factual and almost always tonal.

Her intent is bracingly practical: if you can’t preserve mind and voice together, don’t pretend you’re quoting. You’re rewriting.