![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. If you pull it, it says, OK.” I remember that and I start to write. ![]() And I’ll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. I’ll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. I just want to feel and then when I start to work I’ll remember. I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. I insist that all things are taken off the walls. But I only allow them to come in and empty wastebaskets. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go into the room and there’ll be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the sheets. I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe I look at the work around five I have an orderly dinner-proper, quiet, lovely dinner and then I go back to work the next morning. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. ![]() On writing in hotel rooms: I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in.
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