![]() I’m trying to be a Christian and the Bible helps me to remind myself what I’m about. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and then in the evening if you’re honest and have a little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it done. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy-it’s serious business. I’m working at trying to be a Christian and that’s serious business. INTERVIEWER Do you read it to get inspired to pick up your own pen? ANGELOU For melody. Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. ![]() I read the Bible to myself I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is. What’s the function of the Bible? MAYA ANGELOU The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. On writing with a bottle of sherry and the bible: INTERVIEWER You once told me that you write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible. And then I go home and I read what I’ve written that morning, and I try to edit then. We think it may be moldy!” But I’ve never slept there, I’m usually out of there by 2. About every two months I get a note slipped under the door: “Dear Ms. I ask the management and house-keeping not to enter the room, just in case I’ve thrown a piece of paper on the floor, I don’t want it discarded. I have all the paintings and any decoration taken out of the room. ![]() It would work crossword puzzles or play Solitaire, while the Big Mind would delve deep into the subjects I wanted to write about. And the Big Mind would allow you to consider deep thoughts, but the Little Mind would occupy you, so you could not be distracted. She didn’t mean to, but she used to talk about her “little mind.” So when I was young, from the time I was about 3 until 13, I decided that there was a Big Mind and a Little Mind. On occupying her “little mind” in hotel rooms during writing sessions: Usually a deck of cards and some crossword puzzles. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I’m seeing now. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. 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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