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" 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

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" I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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

" When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology. "

" I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. "

" 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. "

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

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

" When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It's better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. "

" 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. "

" 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

Short

Story

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. "

" Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. "

" Divorce was miserable, as it always is, and we divorce for the same reasons we marry. "

" New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. "

Donald Hall

Old Age

Feel

" Everything important always begins from something trivial. "

" It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.' "

" Obviously, death is ahead of me. I don't look forward to dying one little bit. But, you know, I simply don't worry about it because it's going to happen to me as it does to anybody. "