{"author":"Ted Hughes","author_id":"Ted+Hughes","total_quotes":34,"quotes":[{"text":"I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["czeslaw-milosz","life","poetry","vasko-popa"],"id":2095,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["creative-writing","creativity","ideas","inspiration","thinking","writing"],"id":7545,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"Wadsworth MoorWhere the millstone of skyGrinds light and shadow so purple-fineAnd has ground it so longGrinding the skin off the earthEarth bleeds her raw true darknessA land naked now as a woundThat the sun swabs and dabsWhere the miles of agony are numbnessAnd harebell and heather a euphoria.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["poem","yorkshire-landscape"],"id":8931,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["fear","heart","love","regret"],"id":43504,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"T.S. Eliot said to me 'There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism \u0026 continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (I.E. Even if it’s in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences \u0026 sequences – and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life \u0026 your character.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["craft","poetry","writing-advice"],"id":44066,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees and consultantsEffaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.You trembled with the new life of those engines.That first morning,Before your first class at College, you sat thereSipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,What eyes waited at the back of the classTo check your first professional performanceAgainst their expectations. What assessorsWaited to see you justify the costAnd redeem their gamble. What a furnaceOf eyes waited to prove your metal. I watchedThe strange dummy stiffness, the misery,Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, uglyHalf-approximation to your ideaOf the properties you hoped to ease into,And your horror in it. And the tannedAlmost green undertinge of your faceShrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaitedHead pathetically tiny.You waited,Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezersOf the life that judges you, and I sawThe flayed nerve, the unhealable face-woundWhich was all you had for courage.I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,Were terrors that killed you once already.Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.That blue suit.A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["poetry","poetry","the-blue-flannel-suit"],"id":48498,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["creativity","mysticism","poetry","psychology","spirituality","unconscious"],"id":73513,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["creative-writing","poetry","writing","writing-process","young-writers"],"id":76952,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["acceptance","getting-older","maturity","tolerance"],"id":79084,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"},{"text":"Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.","author":"Ted Hughes","tags":["poem","poetry","writing"],"id":84828,"author_id":"Ted+Hughes"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":34,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}