George Mikes Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
George Mikes was born Mikes Gyorgy on 15 February 1912 in Siklos, in the Kingdom of Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian world whose collapse and aftershocks framed his childhood. He grew up amid Hungary's post-World War I truncation, political volatility, and cultural defensiveness - an atmosphere in which quick wit and verbal agility were not ornaments but tools for navigating class, ideology, and the anxieties of a small country living in the shadow of larger powers.

Hungary between the wars offered a paradox to a budding satirist: a sophisticated urban literary culture - especially in Budapest journalism - coexisted with censorship, nationalism, and periodic authoritarian crackdowns. Mikes learned early how public speech can be both performance and risk. That tension - between what is said and what is meant, between manners and power - later became the engine of his comic writing, which often reads like light conversation yet is built on the hard-earned knowledge of exile and the fragility of belonging.

Education and Formative Influences
He studied in Budapest and entered the profession that best suited a restless observer: journalism. Reporting trained him in compression, the telling detail, and the disciplined ear for how people justify themselves. Central European humor - skeptical, aphoristic, and sharpened by history - shaped his voice, as did the cosmopolitan press culture that looked westward even while it distrusted Western myths. By the late 1930s, with Europe tightening under fascism and war impending, the idea of a stable national identity was already dissolving for many Hungarians; for Mikes, this instability would turn into a lifelong method: treating identity as a social ritual that can be described, imitated, and gently sabotaged.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Mikes moved to Britain on the eve of World War II and remained there, becoming a naturalized British citizen and transforming displacement into a subject. During the war he experienced the indignities and uncertainties common to "enemy alien" lives, then rebuilt himself as a writer in English, a choice that was both pragmatic and aesthetic - English became the language of his adopted public and of the manners he would anatomize. His breakthrough was "How to Be an Alien" (1946), a small book with an outsized afterlife, followed by a long sequence of comic travel and national-character works including "How to Be Inimitable" (1960) and "How to Be Decadent" (1977), as well as stage writing and steady journalism, notably for the BBC. The turning point was not a single prize but the discovery that a foreigner's angle - affectionate, baffled, precise - could explain England to itself while giving an exile a durable home in observation.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Mikes' style is the comedy of manners repurposed as social anthropology: short sentences, deliberate understatement, and the insinuation that etiquette is a form of metaphysics. He wrote as someone who had seen states collapse and slogans harden into violence, and who therefore trusted jokes more than ideologies. "Jokes are better than war. Even the most aggressive jokes are better than the least aggressive wars. Even the longest jokes are better than the shortest wars". The line is funny, but its psychology is sober: laughter becomes an ethical alternative to coercion, a way to discharge aggression without turning it into policy.

His most famous England observations work because they are not really about Englishness; they are about the human need to belong and the equally human need to stand apart. "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one". The joke highlights a society that internalizes rules until they feel like personal conscience - and it hints at the outsider's longing for predictability after the chaos of continental history. Likewise, "Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game". Beneath the quip is Mikes' recurring theme: cultures distribute seriousness differently, and the foreigner learns those distributions the way one learns a new grammar, by making mistakes and being corrected - sometimes gently, sometimes coldly. Throughout, he uses the mask of the amused immigrant to explore loneliness, the performance of civility, and the quiet violence of exclusion practiced through politeness rather than force.

Legacy and Influence
Mikes died on 30 August 1987, but "How to Be an Alien" remains one of the most durable comic portraits of Britain in the 20th century - a book that continues to circulate because it flatters and punctures at once. He helped establish a template for the modern expat satirist: the writer who loves a place enough to study it and differs from it enough to see its invisible rules. In an era shaped by mass migration, border politics, and debates over national character, his work endures not as a set of stereotypes but as a humane method - using comedy to turn cultural friction into curiosity, and the ache of exile into a form of belonging on the page.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by George, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Peace.

• 1962 Switzerland for Beginners (Book)
• 1961 How to Be Decadent (Book)
• 1960 How to Be Inimitable (Book)
• 1946 How to Scrape Skies (Book)
• 1946 How to Be an Alien (Book)

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