H. G. Wells

Literary Birthday – 21 September – H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells was born 21 September 1866, and died 13 August 1946.

12 Quotes

  1. Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
  2. No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
  3. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
  4. Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
  5. If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.
  6. Our true nationality is mankind.
  7. So many promising girls allowed themselves to be submerged altogether in marriage for a time, and when they emerged everyone had forgotten the promise of their début.
  8. Advertising is legalised lying.
  9. We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
  10. If we don’t end war, war will end us.
  11. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.
  12. I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there. (from Experiment in Autobiography)

Read the opening lines of The War of the Worlds:

‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water…’

H. G. Wells was an English writer, best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He also wrote contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called ‘The Father of Science Fiction’, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the WorldsThe Time MachineThe Invisible Man and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H.G._Wells_by_Beresford.jpg

George Charles Beresford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

Posted on: 21st September 2013
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