Donald Hall Writing Quotations

Of course newspaper sportswriting is mostly terrible - and of course it is usually the best writing in the paper.

Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine.

I want to sleep like the birds then wake to write you again without hope that you read me.

If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.

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

To desire to write poems that endure-we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and if we succeed we will never know it

Work is style, and there is style without thought; not in theory, only in fact. When I take a sentence in my hand, raise it to the light, rub my hand across it, disjoin it, put it back together again with a comma added, raising the pitch in the front part; when I rub the grain of it, comb the fur of it, re-assemble the bones of it, I am making something that carries with it the sound of a voice, the firmness of a hand. Maybe little more.

Mere literary talent is common; what is rare is endurance, the continuing desire to work hard at writing.