Quotes from Donald Hall

Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.

There's one advantage to smoking, about which we agree. When our breathing starts to vanish, we will not ask, "Why me?

It sounds like a lot of work for my mother, but cooking was almost all she did. In suburban Connecticut, middle-class women were required to stay at home and do nothing but cook and iron. Housecleaning was for immigrants.

It is best to believe the praiser and dismiss the praise.

Every time I write, say, or think "lung cancer," I pick up a Pall Mall to calm myself.

In the eighties and nineties, a New England monthly named Yankee paid me $4,000 four times a year, each time for an essay of a thousand words. Playboy paid an enormous sum in 1975 for my essay "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons," and Reader's Digest reprinted it. In the new century, fees have considerably lessened. A few years ago, a diminished Playboy printed three new essays of mine, and the three stipends together amounted to less than 1975's single check.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day, he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

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.

Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.