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" 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. "

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" As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me. "

Donald Hall

Seventies

Ahead

" 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. "

" For better or worse, poetry is my life. "

" Some days I feel good about my work, and sometimes I feel I've never written anything worthwhile. That's par for the course. "

" When I was a child, I loved old people. My New Hampshire grandfather was my model human being. "

" 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 December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their 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 to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack. "

Donald Hall

Time

Love

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

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