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

- Donald Hall

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.

- Donald Hall

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

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

I've had someone, my assistant, type for me. I've done it that way for more than 50 years because I type with one finger, although quite rapidly.

- Donald Hall

I'd heard of writers who say they hate to write. Not me. I love to do it.

- Donald Hall

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

- 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

I felt the need to be more open and expressive of my feelings, not just about the hills and the countryside, but about the daily life.

- Donald Hall

I expect my immortality will last about six seconds after my funeral.

- Donald Hall

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

- 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

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

- Donald Hall

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

- Donald Hall

For better or worse, poetry is my life.

- Donald Hall

Everything important always begins from something trivial.

- Donald Hall

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

- Donald Hall

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

- Donald Hall

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

- Donald Hall

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

- Donald Hall