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.
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.
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.
Fidelity to the subject's thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.
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.
