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" Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays. "
Donald Hall
Four
Years
New
Related Quotes:
" 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'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it. "
Donald Hall
Me
Say
Write
" 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
" It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not 'pass away.' "
Donald Hall
Die
Will
Away
" I don't have a computer. I never have had one. "
Donald Hall
Had
Never
Computer
" I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70. "
Donald Hall
Age
Aging
Than
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Great
Looking
Say
" Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course. "
Donald Hall
Sometimes
Feel
Feel Good
" 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
" By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press. "
Donald Hall
Tiger
Small
Love
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Poetry
Write
Think
" In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings. "
Donald Hall
Seen
Were
My Life
" In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. "
Donald Hall
Through
Left
First
" 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. "
Donald Hall
London
Best
Cooking
" Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious. "
Donald Hall
Wicked
Bedroom
Dangerous
" 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. "
Donald Hall
High
School
Hate
" For better or worse, poetry is my life. "
Donald Hall
Better
Life
My Life
" 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
Me
Old Age
Feel
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Choose
Chocolate
Cake
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Slow
Balance
Cook
" 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
" Not everything in old age is grim. I haven't walked through an airport for years, and wheelchairs are the way to travel. "
Donald Hall
Old
Age
Airport
" 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
" 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'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
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Look
Death
Know
" I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times. "
Donald Hall
Times
Over
Worked
" 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 expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral. "
Donald Hall
Will
Expect
Funeral
" 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. "
Donald Hall
Words
Kind
Head