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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.