Jack Vance Quotes
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
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'All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.'
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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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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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Your doctrines are remarkable! As if I existed only to fulfill your cravings! Then, since I do not care to do so, the cosmos must be considered insane.
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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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Sir, my life, drab and insipid though it may seem to others, is the only life given me to live.
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When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.
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The creature displayed the qualities reminiscent of both coelenterate and echinoderm. A terrene nudibranch? A mollusc deprived of its shell? More importantly, was the creature edible?
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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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It had been suggested to her that the flaw lay not in the universe but in herself.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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They call me a renegade.The epithet is inaccurate and undeserved. I cannot be faithless to a cause which I never have endorsed. Indeed, I am absolutely faithful to the only cause I espouse, which is my own welfare. I take pride in this unswerving loyalty!
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic!
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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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'It is simple dog-eat-dog,' said Waylock. It’s basic battle for survival, fiercer and more brutal than ever before in the history of man. You have blinded yourself; you subscribe to false theories; you are permeated with your obsession-not only you but all of us. If we faced the facts of existence, our palliatories would be less crowded.'
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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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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!