145 Quotes by Donald Hall

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

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

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

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.

It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.

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

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 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.

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