Jack Vance Quotes & Sayings

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

#2. 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 and tricksters.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#4. The symbologist made a cryptic sign. That remains to be seen, as the cat said who voided into the sugar bowl.

Jack Vance

#5. Let us leave this room, said Melancthe. It reeks of the brain.

Jack Vance

#6. It seems to limit you; when you're working in an office, you're a creature in a small cell under somebody's supervision and surveillance.

Jack Vance

#7. The secret, so Shimrod knew, was never to accept the fairies' terms, but always to close the deal on one's own stipulations, otherwise the bargain was sure to turn sour.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#9. The young woman quoted Turgenev, "If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly or even harm him, you reproach him with every defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself.

Jack Vance

#10. Twango's hospitality, though largely symbolic, does him credit.

Jack Vance

#11. This flattery has been rather slow in coming. I think all of sudden late in life now I'm getting some credit for what I've done. Which is gratifying, but it's kind of a little late.

Jack Vance

#12. I am not Cugel the Clever for nothing!

Jack Vance

#13. I am not partial to folk who are grim and austere. I prefer fanciful folk who make me laugh.

Jack Vance

#14. In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

Jack Vance

#15. I will be glad to go. There is no poetry here. It is as I have always set forth: joy comes of its own free will; it cannot be belabored.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#17. I never made lots of money at it, but I sold enough.

Jack Vance

#18. 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 multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.

Jack Vance

#19. The world now lacks a " Sir Pom-pom", with all his funny ways! I wonder where he is now? Or is he anywhere at all? Can someone be nowhere?

Jack Vance

#20. Somewhere there is mystery. It impels one to theosophy: to the worship of a space-god, or a god of light." "Theory dissolves the mystery, though it lays bare a cryptic new stratum. Quite likely there is an endless set of these layers, mystery below mystery.

Jack Vance

#21. We hold that gain after toil, triumph after adversity, achievement to a goal long-sought, is a greater beneficence than prebendary nutrient from the teat of an indulgent government.

Jack Vance

#22. In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#24. Excellent; all is well. The 'everlasting tedium' exactly countervenes the 'immediate onset of death' and I am left only with the 'canker' which, in the person of Firx, already afflicts me. One must use his wits in dealing with maledictions.

Jack Vance

#25. Who are our basic enemies? This is a secret, unknown even to these basic enemies. - Xaviar Skolcamp, Over-Centennial Fellow of the Institute, indulgently, in response to a journalist's too-searching question

Jack Vance

#26. 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.

Jack Vance

#27. There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

Jack Vance

#28. So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.

Jack Vance

#29. A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.

Jack Vance

#30. 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.

Jack Vance

#31. 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.

Jack Vance

#32. How I hate you," he said softly. "If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.

Jack Vance

#33. I become drunk as circumstances dictate.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#36. But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

Jack Vance

#37. My talismans are not obviously useless.

Jack Vance

#38. 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 anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#40. 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.

Jack Vance

#41. Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.

Jack Vance

#42. Living creatures, if nothing else, have the right to life. It is their only truly precious possession, and the stealing of life is a wicked theft

Jack Vance

#43. I never worked in an office in my life.

Jack Vance

#44. Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.

Jack Vance

#45. 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.

Jack Vance

#46. 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.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#48. 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 slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

Jack Vance

#49. I give dignity second place to expedience.

Jack Vance

#50. Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.

Jack Vance

#51. I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.

Jack Vance

#52. But I've sure worked at jobs where I have been under inspection.

Jack Vance

#53. 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 ...

Jack Vance

#54. Somebody else's ignorance is bliss.

Jack Vance

#55. Cease the bickering! I am indulging the exotic whims of a beautiful princess and must not be distracted.

Jack Vance

#56. She seems somewhat morose and out of sorts. Do you beat her often?'
'I must admit that I do not.'
'There is the answer! Beat her well; beat her often! It will bring roses to her cheeks! There is nothing better to induce good cheer in a woman than a fine constitutional beating.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#58. I understand that in your youth you contrived a few outrages of your own."
"In my youth?" sputtered Navarth. "I have contrived outrages all my life!

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#60. Good music always defeats bad luck.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#62. The world is a place of marvels

Jack Vance

#63. Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.

Jack Vance

#64. You are young; you have hopes. One by one they will go, and nothing will be left but the bare fact of life.

Jack Vance

#65. I am a dull fellow ... my person reeks, my conversation consists of insipid platitudes.

Jack Vance

#66. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible.

Jack Vance

#67. Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.

Jack Vance

#68. 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.

Jack Vance

#69. Am I known as Cugel the Clever for nothing?

Jack Vance

#70. Death is the heritage of life; a man's vitality is like air in a bladder. Poinct this bubble and away, away, away, flees life, like the color of fading dream.

Jack Vance

#71. Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. - Popular aphorism.

Jack Vance

#72. Someone who conceals his curiosity, is overwhelmed with information.

Jack Vance

#73. We prostrate ourselves before the fish-god Yob, who seems as efficacious as any.

Jack Vance

#74. I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#76. Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.

Jack Vance

#77. An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.

Jack Vance

#78. I live in a constant flux; I am unable to make fixed plans.

Jack Vance

#79. Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

Jack Vance

#80. Candor is never indiscreet. Truth, which is to say, the reflection of life, is beautiful.

Jack Vance

#81. Light slanting down across Alode the Cliff illuminated a hundred forests; the irradiated foliage seemed to glow with internal light: bitter lime, intense gray-blue given pointillist fire by scarlet seed-pots, dark umber, black-blue, black-green

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

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

Jack Vance

#84. The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.

Jack Vance

#85. Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox - finally irregulationary.

Jack Vance

#86. There had been an attempt to humiliate him. It had not succeeded. He had paid, but pain, like pleasure, has no duration. Pride was an entity more persistent.

Jack Vance

#87. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since whatever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapors rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.

Jack Vance

#88. 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.

Jack Vance

#89. 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.

Jack Vance

#90. An enemy, perhaps. Ah, so simple. Liane will kill you ten men. Two steps forward, thrust - thus!" He lunged. "And souls go thrilling up like bubbles in a beaker of mead.

Jack Vance

#91. A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain ... The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.

Jack Vance

#92. You are evil like all existence ... If power were mine I would crush the universe to bloody gravel and stamp into the ultimate muck!

Jack Vance

#93. 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.

Jack Vance

#94. I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.

Jack Vance