Best 88 quotes of Jack Vance on MyQuotes

Jack Vance

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    Good music always defeats bad luck

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    I become drunk as circumstances dictate.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    Somebody else's ignorance is bliss.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

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

  • By Anonym
    Jack Vance

    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.