Paris Review Interview: David McCullough

Growing up in Pittsburgh I went to a wonderful public school where the arts were given as much attention as standard subjects like math and history. We had art and music every day. We were taken to museums and steel mills. I had excellent teachers both in grade school and high school. Most of us are lucky if we have two or three teachers who change our lives and I had several, especially Vincent Scully, who taught art and architecture at Yale. He taught us to see, to think about spaces, to pay attention to what the buildings were saying, and to think about what the alternatives were, what might have been built that wasn’t. And few men I’ve known have such a great understanding of America. I also took Daily Themes at Yale, Robert Penn Warren’s writing course. Every morning at eight-thirty you had to slide a sheet of original prose under the professor’s door, and if you didn’t, you got a zero. There was no kidding about it. It taught us discipline, to produce.

The hardest thing with writing is to make it look effortless. It’s true of everything that’s done well. People see a performer or an artist or a carpenter and they think, Well, that looks easy. Little do they know.

I get a bit impatient with people who talk about all the trials and the pain and loneliness of being a writer. That’s not been my experience. I love the work. I would pay to do what I do. That’s not to say it’s easy, but I don’t think ease and pleasure are necessarily synonymous. I like it in part because it is hard. And because I don’t know how it’s going to come out.
- David McCullough, Paris Review