Donald Hall Quotes

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

I was always interested in choreography - in making people think and feel something.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

The art of making art, is putting it together.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.

Art is more engaging that propaganda.

I don't see the world unless I see it in ink.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.

The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

My paintings and comedy have a lot in common. They are both improvisations based on observation.

If you're going to paint extremely, you need a big piece of canvas.

Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

Writing is about a blank piece of paper and leaving out what’s not supposed to be there.