Jack Vance Quotes
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What a strange and unfamiliar world if everyone were treated according to his deserts!
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Now was the present, now was the time containing that sweet union of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, spirit, will and imagination named Nancy.
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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.
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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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It was right and proper to exploit the excellences of the moment, but still, when conditions reached an apex, there was nowhere to go but down.
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Cease the bickering! I am indulging the exotic whims of a beautiful princess and must not be distracted.
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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.
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Ah! Five hundred years I have toiled to entice this creature, despairing, doubting, brooding by night, yet never abandoning hope that my calculations were accurate and my great talisman cogent. Then, when finally it appears, you fall upon it for no other reason than to sate your repulsive gluttony!
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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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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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Speaking our language, you will understand us-and if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him.
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Sorry, I’m not at home. I have gone out to my world Fancy, and I cannot be reached. Call back in a week, unless your business is urgent, in which case call back in a month.
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Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.
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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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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
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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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'Down we go,' said Paddy. 'Now pray to Saint Anthony if you be a good Catholic-''I'm not,' snapped Fay, 'and if you'll give more mind to the boat and less to religion we’ll gain by it.'
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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.
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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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Gassoon, for all his lore, subscribed to a common fallacy: he assumed that all those whom he encountered appraised him in the same terms as he did himself.
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If one basic axiom controls the cosmos, it must be this: In a situation of infinity every possible condition occurs, not once, but an infinite number of times.
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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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Dismount and kneel before me, that I may strike off your head with fullest ease. You shall die in this tragic golden light of sunset.