Donald Hall

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

We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.

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.

I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.

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.

My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

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

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.

When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.

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.

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