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" I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "
Donald Hall
Times
Over
Worked
Related Quotes:
" Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence. "
Donald Hall
Die
Silence
Old Age
" I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world. "
Donald Hall
House
Place
World
" In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. "
Donald Hall
Time
First
Bad
" I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut - during the school time of year - but I preferred it in New Hampshire. I preferred the culture, the landscape, the relative solitude. I've always loved it. "
Donald Hall
Solitude
School
Loved
" I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed. "
Donald Hall
Point
Weather
Happy
" Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language. "
Donald Hall
Beautiful
Work
School
" I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer. "
Donald Hall
Work
Think
Out
" In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it. "
Donald Hall
Writing
New
Pay
" I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it. "
Donald Hall
Say
You
Poetry
" In anything you write - in a short story, a poem - there has to be a counter-motion; it can't go all in one direction. "
Donald Hall
Go
Short
Story
" I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know. "
Donald Hall
Know
Hope
Future
" Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. "
Donald Hall
Divorce
Always
Same
" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "
Donald Hall
Important
Always
Everything
" However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. "
Donald Hall
Unknown
Alert
Antiquity
" There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going. "
Donald Hall
Book
Me
Always
" I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry. "
Donald Hall
Books
Excitement
Harvard
" Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying. "
Donald Hall
Understood
Something
Many
" I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "
Donald Hall
Me
Say
Write
" Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. "
Donald Hall
My Life
Poetry
Done
" I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning. "
Donald Hall
She
Changes
Leave
" I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly. "
Donald Hall
Done
Years
Way
" I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them. "
Donald Hall
Man
Myself
Poetry
" Both my New Hampshire great-grandfathers wore facial hair: the Copperhead who fought in the war and the sheep farmer too old for combat. "
Donald Hall
Farmer
New
Hair
" I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "
Donald Hall
Will
Expect
Funeral
" My problem isn't death but old age. I fret about my lack of balance, my buckling knee, my difficulty standing up and sitting down. "
Donald Hall
Balance
Death
Problem
" Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. "
Donald Hall
Wicked
Bedroom
Dangerous
" As I look at the barn in my ninth decade, I see the no-smoking sign, rusted and tilting on the unpainted gray clapboard. My grandfather, born in 1875, milked his cattle there a century ago. "
Donald Hall
Born
Barn
Look
" My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books. "
Donald Hall
Me
Christmas
Parents
" Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. "
Donald Hall
Stuff
Children
Wife
" In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis. "
Donald Hall
Day
Smooth
Time