Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying. "

" 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. "

" When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe. "

Donald Hall

Boy

Horror

" Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems. "

" It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them. "

" I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "

Donald Hall

Say

Write

" However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. "

" One Oxford poet confessed to me that I had been scary because I talked American and wore tennis shoes. "

" Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. "

" After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry. "

" 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. "

" I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "

" I don't have a computer. I never have had one. "

" In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings. "

" 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

Always

" There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want. "

" Contentment is work so engrossing that you do not know that you are working. "

" Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I finished my initial year at Oxford, I flew home to marry Kirby, who had been my girlfriend in college. We had met on a blind date. "

" Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. "

" I would work until I got stuck, and I would put it down and pick up something else. I might be able to take a 20-minute nap and get to work again. That way, I was able to work about 10 hours a day... It was important to me to work every day. I managed to work on Christmas day, just to be able to say I worked 365 days a year. "

" On September twentieth every year, I got to choose my menu - meatloaf, corn niblets, and rice were followed by candles on chocolate cake with vanilla icing and a scoop of Brock-Hall ice cream. "

" 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

Christmas

Parents

" 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. "

" A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s. "

" 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. "

" I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70. "

" Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less. "