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Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers QUOTES

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers QUOTES

1 " [David] Salle's earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

2 " What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

3 " In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

4 " Every amateur harbors the fantasy that his work is only waiting to be discovered; a second fantasy-that the established contemporary artists must also be frauds- is a necessary corollary "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

5 " The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

6 " There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets--these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

7 " [David] Salle's studio, on the second floor of a five-story loft building, is a long room lit with bright, cold overhead light. It is not a beautiful studio. Like the streets outside, it gives no quarter to the visitor in search of the picturesque. It doesn't even have a chair for the visitor to sit in, unless you count a backless, half-broken metal swivel chair Salle will offer with a murmur of inattentive apology. Upstairs, in his living quarters, it is another story. But down here everything has to do with work and with being alone. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

8 " Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn’t know how to lie. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

9 " What makes classic children’s literature so appealing (to all ages) is its undeviating loyalty to the world of the child. In the best children’s books, parents never share the limelight with their children; if they are not killed off on page 1, they are cast in the pitifully minor roles that parents play in their children’s imaginative lives. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers

10 " Theory and interpretation, far from threatening works of art, keep them alive. "

― Janet Malcolm , Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers