Jack Vance Quotations

the reality is it costs a lot of money.

So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.

I don't have much vanity. I just know what I do. I just do because I'm capable of doing it and do it easily without any pretentiousness.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.

This flattery has been rather slow in coming. I think all of sudden late in life now I'm getting some credit for what I've done. Which is gratifying, but it's kind of a little late.

It's just I wanted to get myself in a line of work where I didn't have a boss, where I didn't have to show up any place at any particular time.

It seems to limit you; when you're working in an office, you're a creature in a small cell under somebody's supervision and surveillance.

I never made lots of money at it, but I sold enough.

Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.

I give dignity second place to expedience.

It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.

The life we've been leading couldn't last forever. It's a wonder it lasted as long as it did.

In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real...

If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.

The less a writer discusses his work and himself the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.

Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace and egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.

You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.

I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.

I never worked in an office in my life.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.

I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.

I haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to.

Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.

Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.

What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.

Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.

Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.

The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.

I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.

Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.

Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.

This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.

Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn't a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.

I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.

I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.

Why make plans? The sun might well go out tomorrow.

The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.

I must cite an intrinsic condition of the universe. We set forth in any direction which seems convenient; each leads to the same place: the end of the universe.

Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.

When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.

Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party whether he realizes it or not must always come out the worse.

I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.

Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.

I become drunk as circumstances dictate.

Somebody else's ignorance is bliss.

I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.

Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.

Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.

The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.

In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.

I do not care to listen; obloquy injures my self-esteem and I am skeptical of praise.

Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.

There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

I'd never been published when I was young.

A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.

Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.

I understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory.

What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.

While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.

A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.

Good music always defeats bad luck

Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience.

If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.