Maya Angelou: Absolutely. Then we become brutes. Then we risk being consumed by brutism. There’s a statement which I use in all my classes, no matter what I’m teaching. I put on the board the statement, "I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me." Then I put it down in Latin, "Homo sum humani nil a me alienum puto." And then I show them its origin. The statement was made by Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terance. He was an African and a slave to a Roman senator. Freed by that senator, he became the most popular playwright in Rome. Six of his plays and that statement have come down to us from 154 bce. This man, not born white, not born free, said I am a human being.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance. When I finish lecturing, I find that the whole audience, black and white, is a little bit changed, because I will have recited Sonya Sanchez, Anne Marie Evans, and probably Eugene Redmond, and Amiri Baraka, and Shakespeare and Emerson, and maybe talk about Norman Mailer a little bit, because he writes English, and Joan Didion, who writes this language. People see something. I don’t know how long the change maintains, but if you have changed at all, you’ve changed all, at least for a little while.

Melvin McLeod: Dr. Angelou, I’m extremely impressed with the values and the moral lessons that you bring to such a very wide audience. I think it is a very positive contribution you make to this society. As a writer, do you simply write for your own inner purposes, and let people take from it what they will, or do you have a conscious didactic purpose in your work?

Maya Angelou: Well, I think everybody has a conscious didactic purpose. I want to tell the truth. This is a very simple way of describing it. I will tell the truth. I may not tell the facts; facts can obscure the truth. You can tell so many facts you never get to the truth. Margaret Walker says you can talk about the places where, the people who, the times when, the methods how, the reasons why, and never get to the truth.

So I want to tell the truth as I see it, as I’ve lived it. I will not tell everything I know. But what I do say is the truth. Now that is at once for myself, but it’s also to be of use to and present with young people, who in many cases have been lied to so ferociously by the society and by their parents. They are told, oh, you shouldn’t make any mistakes, when in truth, it may be imperative that you encounter defeat so you can know who you are. I mean, what can you take? How can you rely on yourself? In my work I constantly say, this is how I fell and this is how I was able to rise. It may be important that you fall. Life is not over. Just don’t let defeat defeat you. See where you are, and then forgive yourself, and get up.

bell hooks: One thing that has happened for me is that I feel enormously blessed to be a successful black woman writer in this culture, but I have found my small fame, such as it is, to be very isolating. I was really happy to see you writing about some of the pitfalls of fame, because I think that especially for black women, the more we rise from the bottom, the more we move and journey, the more we are the targets of the most brutal and vicious attacks.

Maya Angelou: That’s true. The only thing I’d say is this: you’re also going to be attacked if you stay down there. So you may as well move. Everything costs, all the time, all the time. It costs to lose and it costs to win, so you may as well win, and do what you came here to do.

bell hooks: It seems to me a lot of Even the Stars Look Lonesome is about that power of journeying and crossing boundaries.

Maya Angelou: That’s it. I think that sometimes we become lethargic out of fear. It’s not really laziness so much as it is timidity. We’d rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of, when in truth the place where one is standing may be untenable, it may be dangerous, it may be stultifying, and it’s better to just step on. You know, you have to move.

bell hooks: Well, how has your stellar fame changed your life?

Maya Angelou: Well, let me speak of the few negatives first. The larger my name becomes, the more I am a target, yes. People sometimes put people on pedestals so they can see them more clearly so they can knock them off. There is that in the human psyche. Sometimes people are at your feet, and as the winds of fortune change, they’ll be at your throat. I understand that. What I do is I follow the advice of the West African philosopher, which is, "Don’t pick them up, don’t lay them down." That is, when someone says, "You’re the greatest, you’re the absolute, you’re a genius," you say, "Thank you so much, thank you, bye-bye, bye-bye." Because if I pick them up, you see, I got to then believe when they say, "You’re nothing, you’re a charlatan, you’re a..." oh, some of the words, ugh.