A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

The remark overturns the romantic notion that writers are simply people to whom words come easily. Mann suggests that what distinguishes a serious writer is not effortless fluency but heightened difficulty: greater self-criticism, sharper sensitivity to nuance, and a stronger sense of responsibility to form and truth. Writing becomes harder precisely because the writer is more aware of what language can and cannot do, and because the standards applied to each sentence are stricter than those of ordinary communication. The line also implies that struggle is not evidence of incompetence but a defining feature of the craft—an index of ambition and seriousness rather than a defect.