Transcripts

MAYA ANGELOU: I have come close many times to putting into words what I mean. But I don't know any writer who really can say that she or he has captured in words exactly what she was thinking. It's like trying to explain the taste of bitterness on the tongue. Unless you say it's like something else, you can't make a person know.

And I mean, you can take a few words, a few nouns, a few pronouns, some adjectives, and adverbs and dangling participles, if you like, bond them together. You can throw them against the wall and make them bounce. You can make people want to go to war. You can make people long for peace with words. And yet, they run from the writer, from me anyway.

I know there are people who say Maya Angelou-- I mean, critics who say Maya Angelou has a new book. And, of course, it's good. But then, she's a natural writer. Being a natural writer is like being a natural open heart surgeon. I worked very hard over and over. Nathaniel Hawthorne said, "Easy reading is damned hard writing." And I know that's true.

I mean, it may take a day to work on one paragraph until it just seems to flow. That's what I'm looking for. I want to have a reader reading 30 pages of a book of mine before she knows she's reading. That's what I want. I've never been able to achieve it. I get it if I have a page sometimes. I'm not being coy or glib really. I mean, really, I've just never been able to say exactly what I mean.

SPEAKER: Is it as much about the rhythm and the musicality of the words of the way they sound as it is on the page?

MAYA ANGELOU: Well, it's not just that. You see, not everyone in the world admires or hates a painting or looks at art every day. Not everyone in the world considers dance every day. Nobody really uses music all day-- has to use it. But anyone in the world who is not a mute or hermit uses words, which is why we take them so for granted.

Everyone in his or her language uses words. And so this is what we have to do. We have to take this most familiar thing. And by the arrangement of the nouns and pronouns and adjectives, and make them seem new. Make a reader in Des Moines, Iowa, read my work and say I know what that means. I know. I know how she felt. I've got to make an Asian man in Kowloon read my work and say, yeah, I understand that. You see?

SPEAKER: It's a difficult challenge.

MAYA ANGELOU: It's no small matter. So when people walk up and say to me, I could write a book. I think, will you write my next? No, but people don't, I think, about the unending work to write well.