Jack Vance Quotes

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

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace and egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.

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

What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 more real than things.

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.