Donald Hall
Donald Hall

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

Donald Hall
Donald Hall

Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.

Donald Hall
Donald Hall

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

Donald Hall
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
Donald Hall

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
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
Donald Hall

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
Donald Hall

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
Donald Hall

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.

Donald Hall
Donald Hall

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
Donald Hall

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.

Donald Hall
Donald Hall

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.

Donald Hall
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
Donald Hall

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
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
Donald Hall

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

Donald Hall
Donald Hall

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
Donald Hall

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
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
Donald Hall

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