Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes.
My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen.
The journalistic 'I' is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others.
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.
My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe.
The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.
