Donald Hall Quotes

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

The songs started as a soundscapes, and then came the words and music; each song took at least a year to make.

The only damn thing I ever learned in all my years in art school was a piece is never done, it is just finished. You have to trust your inner voice, your instincts, when they tell you pencils down. And you roll up your sleeves and you start over again.

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes.

It's been 50 years since I was on the roof of my parents' house shooting Hag in a Black Leather Jacket when I didn't even know there was such a thing as editing. I thought you just shot the film and showed it. That's exactly what I did. I'm not that different 50 years later.

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.

It's a very simple process. He [Danny Boyl] comes in the tube (subway) and then he sits with me for 3 hours every evening and then I work on something. Then later, if he likes something, I put it even more perfectly. I tweak stuff. So this happened for 3 or 4 weeks and the music was done.

I was 14 years old when I started rapping and I was terrible. I fell in love with it though and when that happens with me I become super passionate and go all the way with it.

These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.

I was sickly as a child and gravitated to books and drawing. During my early teen years, I spent hundreds of hours at my window, sketching neighborhood children at play. I sketched and listened, and those notebooks became the fertile field of my work later on. There is not a book I have written or a picture I have drawn that does not, in some way, owe them its existence.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

I think any good artist - and I'm not saying that I am one - takes notes and should first emulate their heroes and then try to move beyond them.

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

The world that seemed so various and new, well, it does contract. One's burning desire to investigate human behavior, and to make, or imply, statements about it, does fall off. And so one does find that early works are full of energy and also full of vulgarity, crudity, and incompetence, and later works are more carefully finished, and in that sense better literary products. But . . . there's often a freshness that is missing in later works--for every gain there's a loss. I think it evens out in that way.

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.

I thought that if I practiced doing melodies for a year or so at home, I would learn to think melodically, and when I went to work it would come out, and it did, on this album. What else was important to me...? I spend a lot of time in the grocery store, shopping.

It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre.

Don’t be in too much of a rush to be published. There is enormous value in listening and reading and writing—and then putting your words away for weeks or months–and then returning to your work to polish it some more.

I think that, right now, I am travelling in many different directions in my mind, on where I wanted to be. So much is wantin' to go back, but I still gotta move forward. But I think it's just that I'm my worst critic at all times, you know? And when I make somethin', it may be five or ten cuts later before I actually call it what it is. I've always been that kind of artist. I'm gonna put myself through the sweat for it, because I think, as an artist, that's what made me iller, is the fact that I didn't wanna just put out anything and everything. It's just a process, you know what I mean?

When you organize your work and look back at your entire production, it may feel like you're looking at a straight line, but in fact it's nothing like that. The work is very experimental and most of the time it develops like branches. I usually see a capillary, like a tree shape where there are... branches that sort of move because you're not tending to them.

Go find very early versions of things: the first TV pilot of a later-successful TV show; early audition tapes by famous actors; early demos by famous musicians. Focus on these early examples, not what they became over the next 20 years. Remember that what you're doing will constantly improve.