Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Hughes

Hughes draws a clean, almost impolite line between information and imagination, and the provocation is the point. Non-fiction, in his framing, is a service industry: it delivers clarity, settles disputes, closes the file. Fiction, by contrast, is an irritant. It reopens the file and refuses the comfort of a final answer. The sentence works because it flatters neither camp. It demotes reportage from high art to utility, then turns around and gives novelists a harder job than merely inventing plots: they have to generate the kind of uncertainty that lingers after the last page.

The subtext is a defense of ambiguity at a time when modern life was increasingly organized by “solutions” - bureaucracies, experts, statistics, official histories. Hughes wrote in a century that sold itself on progress and proof, then repeatedly collapsed into war, propaganda, and ideological certainty. In that environment, “answers” can start to look like weapons: the state has answers, the party has answers, the newspaper headline has answers by deadline. Fiction’s “questions” become a moral posture, a refusal to pretend that human motives and collective guilt can be reduced to a neat conclusion.

There’s also a sly jab at readers. We often approach books looking to be informed or reassured; Hughes is arguing that the serious novel should do the opposite: make you complicit, make you uncomfortable, make your own assumptions feel suddenly unstable. Fiction doesn’t compete with non-fiction on accuracy. It competes on pressure - the pressure it puts on the stories we tell ourselves to live with what we’ve done.