Daily Inspiration Quote by George Plimpton

Plimpton is quietly demoting the editor from judge to court stenographer, and it’s a power move dressed up as modesty. “Oral biography” isn’t just a format choice; it’s an ethics claim: let the voices stay jagged, contradictory, unresolved. The “pleasure” he points to is the thrill of unfiltered testimony, the sense that you’re hearing people the way they actually remember themselves - not the way a biographer retrofits them into a clean arc.

The courtroom metaphor does a lot of work. If the reader is “jury,” then the witnesses are the friends, rivals, ex-spouses, hangers-on - each with an angle, each partially reliable. The editor’s traditional authority (selecting, smoothing, adjudicating) is reframed as suspect, even paternalistic. Plimpton implies that editorial omniscience is a kind of coercion: it forces a verdict before the evidence is fully felt.

There’s subtext here about American literary culture in the late 20th century, when Plimpton’s brand of New Journalism prized immediacy and scene over the distant god-voice. Oral history/biography (think Studs Terkel, later the celebrity oral biographies) offered a democratic sheen: many mouths, many truths. But the line also contains a sly dodge. Editors still choose excerpts, order them, and build the case. Declaring the reader the jury flatters the audience while laundering the editor’s invisible influence.

The intent, then, is twofold: defend a collage method as more “honest,” and position the reader as active - not consuming a verdict, but constructing one out of messy, human testimony.