Wit & Attitude Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Easy reading is damn hard writing” is Hawthorne puncturing a comforting myth: that clarity is natural and difficulty is a sign of depth. He’s writing in an American literary moment that prized moral seriousness and stylistic polish, when a novelist’s authority depended on making weighty ideas feel inevitable on the page. The profanity is the point. “Damn” drags the statement out of genteel parlor wisdom and into the workshop, where sentences get planed down, joints tightened, splinters removed.

The intent is part defense, part provocation. Hawthorne is answering the casual reader who glides through a chapter and assumes the author merely “had a gift.” He’s also warning fellow writers against mistaking friction for artistry. If a paragraph feels effortful to read, it may not be profound; it may be unfinished. Ease is engineered. It’s pacing, selection, and restraint: choosing the one image that carries the scene, cutting the clever detour, burying the labor so the reader can stay inside the spell.

Subtextually, Hawthorne is arguing for an ethics of craft. The writer’s job is not to flaunt difficulty but to absorb it on the reader’s behalf. That’s why the line still lands in an era of “content” churn and algorithmic prose: real readability isn’t a template, it’s attention. The smoother the surface, the more sanding happened underneath.