Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916,) who wrote under the pseudonym Saki, was a British short-story writer. He is best known for his witty and delightfully whimsical and macabre stories that frequently depict animals as agents seeking revenge against humankind. His works are full of funny sayings and surprise twists.
Born in Akyab, Burma (now Myanmar,) where his father was the inspector-general of police, Munro was raised in Devonshire, England. He returned to Burma after his education and worked in the police force for two years, but left to England after a bad case of malaria.
Munro became a journalist, traveled in the Balkans, Russia, and France as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post. He published The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900,) inspired by Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and The Westminster Alice (1902,) a parody of Lewis Carroll’s work.
Many of Munro’s short stories first appeared in the Westminster Gazette under the pseudonym “Saki,” which he took from the last stanza of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
In all, Saki published five collections of short stories and wrote three novels and several plays. His first collection of stories was published under the title Reginald (1904.) Other volumes followed: Reginald in Russia (1910,) The Chronicles of Clovis (1911,) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914.)
Saki’s stories were usually fewer than 3,000 words because he wrote them for newspapers. They are remembered for his debunking of social snobbery and upper-class fatuity in the Edwardian society in which he had been raised. A German sniper killed him in 1916.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Christians, Christianity
No one can be an unbeliever nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to disbelieve.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Atheism
Children with Hyacinth’s temperament don’t know better as they grow older; they merely know more.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Knowledge
I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Money
Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Children
I always say beauty is only sin deep.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Sin
It’s no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Manners, Behavior
There is nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Buddhism
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Servants, Service
He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Happiness, Self-Pity, Hedonism
Great Socialist statesmen aren’t made, they’re still-born.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Socialism, Communism
You needn’t tell me that a man who doesn’t love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Eating, Food
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It’s only the middle-aged who are really conscious of their limitations—that is why one should be so patient with them.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Memory, Youth, Aspirations
Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Togetherness, The Poor, Poverty
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Understanding, Honesty, Explanation, One liners, Lies
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: People
Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like—and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Food, Eating
No one has ever said it, but how painfully true it is that the poor have us always with them.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Wealth, Riches
When people grow gradually rich their requirements and standard of living expand in proportion, while their present-giving instincts often remain in the undeveloped condition of their earlier days. Something showy and not-too-expensive in a shop is their only conception of the ideal gift.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Giving, Charity
The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Friends and Friendship
Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Blame, Shame
We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Topics: Politics, Politicians
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