Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)
Context: I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.
“Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity.”
The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Ted Hughes 55
English poet and children's writer 1930–1998Related quotes

Source: "Yan Geling: I Am Also A Person In The Cave" https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/lifebaike/20211010/1635954.html (10 October 2021)

“Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.”

“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”
Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

“writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all”
Source: The Last Night of the Earth Poems