Of course, there are those critics - New York critics as a rule - who say, 'Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.' Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.
Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.
What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
