Jack Vance Quotes

45 quotes in 650 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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 haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to.
• 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…
• As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
• I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.
• 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.
• But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.
• I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

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