Donald Hall Quotes

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

~ Donald Hall

Worship is not love.

~ Donald Hall

[O]ver the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying--in the supermarket, these old ladies won't get out of my way--but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

~ Donald Hall

One day, of course, no one will remember what I remember.

~ Donald Hall

It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.

~ Donald Hall

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

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.

~ Donald Hall

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

~ Donald Hall

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.

~ Donald Hall

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

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

~ Donald Hall

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.

~ Donald Hall

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

~ Donald Hall

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.

~ Donald Hall

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

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.

~ Donald Hall

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.

~ Donald Hall

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

~ Donald Hall

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.

~ Donald Hall

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

~ Donald Hall

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

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.

~ Donald Hall

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.

~ Donald Hall

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

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

~ Donald Hall