Jack Vance Quotes
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These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.
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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.
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Your character, Apollon Zamp, is marred by a certain paltriness of spirit, a diffused universal distrust which I truly deplore.
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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The person who, let us say, expects generosity from a bank, efficient flexibility from a government agency, open-mindedness from a religious institution will be disappointed. In each purview the notions represent immorality. The poor fool might as quickly discover love among the mantises.
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The history of man is a compendium of such evil. We are an evolutionary product, descendants of predators. A few synthetic foods aside, every morsel eaten by man is taken from another living thing. We are intended for murder; we kill to exist!
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Speaking our language, you will understand us-and if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him.
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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
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'I think that I will not answer that question,' he said at last. 'I would create as many false images as there were ears to hear me.''Half as many,' Clissum pointed out delicately.
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He looked around the landscape. Drenched in the golden haze of late afternoon it seemed wonderfully tranquil and beautiful, though permeated with a sense of remoteness and even melancholy, like a scene remembered from one’s youth.
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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.
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What a strange and unfamiliar world if everyone were treated according to his deserts!
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Claghorn had long insisted that no human condition endured forever, with the corollary that the more complicated such a condition, the greater its susceptibility to change.
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There can be no doubt as to the facts as I have stated them. Orthodoxy derives from this axiomatic foundation, and the two systems are mutually reinforcing: hence each is doubly validated.
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I never made lots of money at it, but I sold enough.
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'All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.'
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Kings, like children, tend to be opportunistic. Generosity only spoils them. They equate affability with weakness and hasten to exploit it.
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
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He used a name for himself, true, but we played at Romance, and this is a game where truth is a bagatelle.
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'A natural scientist, examining a single atom, might well be able to asseverate the structure and history of the entire universe!'Bah!' muttered Hurtiancz. 'By the same token, a sensible man need listen to but a single word in order to recognize the whole for egregious nonsense.'
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Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.
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'Why not alter the habits of a lifetime and speak with candour?' asked Shimrod. 'Truth, after all, need not be only the tactic of last resort.'
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.