Maya Angelou? Samuel Johnson? Sheree Crute? Salman Rushdie? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: A writer, now celebrated, faced harsh criticism in the early days of her career. She responded by acknowledging that she required greater mental focus to succeed:
If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution.
This statement has been credited to the memoirist and poet Maya Angelou. She was alluding to a remark made in the eighteenth century. Would you please explore this topic.
Reply from Quote Investigator: In 1981 Maya Angelou published the autobiography “The Heart of a Woman”. She described attending a meeting of the Harlem Writers Guild where she read from her work in progress, a play titled “One Life, One Love”. When she finished, she faced cruel comments such as:1
“I found no life and very little love in the play from the opening of the act to its unfortunate end.”
After the period of criticism ended, the group transitioned to friendly conversation over drinks. Maya Angelou summed up her experience as follows:2
They had stripped me, flayed me, utterly and completely undone me, and now they were as cheery as Christmas cards.
I sipped the cool wine and thought about the evening’s instruction. Because I had a fairly large vocabulary and had been reading constantly since childhood, I had taken words and the art of arranging them too lightly. The writers assaulted my casual approach and made me confront my intention. If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.
Angelou’s comment alluded to a popular quotation from lexicographer Samuel Johnson which appeared in “The Life of Samuel Johnson” by James Boswell in 1791:3
“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
A separate Quote Investigator article about Johnson’s quotation is available here.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In July 1981 “Ms. Magazine” published a book review by Sheree Crute of “The Heart of a Woman”. Crute reprinted Angelou’s remark:4
Under the tutelage of John Killens and the Harlem Writers Guild, she learned that “if I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.”
In 1987 Salman Rushdie published an article in “The Guardian” newspaper of London, and he reprinted Angelou’s remark:5
In The Heart of a Woman, volume four of her famous autobiography, Maya Angelou describes a meeting of the Harlem Writers’ Guild, at which she read some of her work and had it torn to pieces by the group.
It taught her a tough lesson: “If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.”
In 1992 Jennifer Ravi published “Notable North Carolina Women”. The chapter about Maya Angelou included the following:6
But by the time she was 30, she had made the commitment to become a writer. She moved to Brooklyn to learn her craft and be near her friend, John Killens, activist and author. Through weekly meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild, Angelou learned to treat her writing seriously. “If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.”
In conclusion, Maya Angelou deserves credit for the quotation she wrote in her 1981 autobiography “The Heart of a Woman”. The remark echoed a quotation from Samuel Johnson which appeared in the 1791 biography by James Boswell. Angelou was probably deliberately alluding to the earlier remark.
Image Notes: Public domain illustration of a Royal brand typewriter published in 1919. The image has been resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Mardy Grothe who mentioned the quotations by Maya Angelou and Samuel Johnson in the July 26, 2026 issue of his newsletter titled “Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week”. Grothe presented citations for both quotations on his wonderful website “Dr. Mardy’s Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations”.
- 1981 Copyright, The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou, Chapter 2, Quote Page 39, Random House, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1981 Copyright, The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou, Chapter 2, Quote Page 41, Random House, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1791, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Comprehending an Account of His Studies and Numerous Works, Author: James Boswell, Volume 2 of 2, Diary Date: 1777, Quote Page 152, Printed by Henry Baldwin for Charles Dilly, London. (Internet Archive) link ↩︎
- 1981 July, Ms. Magazine, Section Book Reviews, The Examined Life: Biographies & Autobiographies, (Book review of The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou), Quote Page 27, Ms. Foundation for Education and Communication Inc., New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1987 January 12, The Guardian, Songs doesn’t know the score by Salman Rushdie, Quote Page 7, Column 1, London, England. (Newspapers_com) link ↩︎
- 1992, Notable North Carolina Women by Jennifer Ravi, Chapter: Maya Angelou, Quote Page 63, Bandit Books, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. (Verified with scans) ↩︎