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.

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

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

I never worked in an office in my life.

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.

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.

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