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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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