Literary Birthday – 19 April – Richard Hughes

Richard Hughes Quotes

1. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion.(A High Wind in Jamaica)
2. Middle age snuffs out more talent than ever wars or sudden deaths do.
3. All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It’s fiction’s business to ask them.
4. It is a fact that it takes experience before one can realize what is a catastrophe and what is not. Children have little faculty of distinguishing between disaster and the ordinary course of their lives. (A High Wind in Jamaica)
5. Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.
6. A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say.
7. Writing is a race between the publisher and the undertaker. (New York Times obituary)

Richard Hughes was a British writer of poems, short stories, novels, and plays. He is the author of A High Wind in Jamaica, which is a minor classic of 20th-century English literature. His children’s books include The Spider’s Palace and Gertrude’s Child. Hughes was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in the United States, an honorary member of both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1946.

Source for image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NLW_Image_Richard_Hughes.png

by Amanda Patterson

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