Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119, 1990 interviewed by George Plimpton on the stage of the YMHA on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
Photo taken in the Wilbury Theatre, Providence RI
Angelou: 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. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I'd see the rust-red, used, worn velvet seats and the lightness where people's backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it's a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people's faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan—I would have to look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That's that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. Come to me. I love you. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I'm seeing now.
Maya Angelou, The Art of Fiction No. 119, 1990 interviewed by George Plimpton on the stage of the YMHA on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review Photo taken in the Wilbury Theatre, Providence RI Comments are closed.
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