Jack Vance Quotes
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I'm only giving orders because I'm more efficient and smarter than you are.
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Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.
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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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'Truth' is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
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And, stretching in languid warmth, she contrived to twist her body into first one luxurious position, then another.
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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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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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I am not called Cugel the Clever for nothing.
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'Let him talk as he will!' scoffed Zamp. 'His motives are not at all obscure.'
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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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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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These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.
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I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.
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'All is mutability, and thus your three hundred terces has fluctuated to three.'
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If the past is a house of many chambers, then the present is the most recent coat of paint.
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Aillas replied that while King Audry cited several points of technical interest, and used the resources of abstract logic in an adroit manner, he had actually made no connection with reality.
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
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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.
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Shimrod said: 'Once I thought of you as a child in a woman’s body.'Melancthe smiled a cool smile. 'And now?''The child seems to have wandered away.'
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'I'm sure you didn’t mean to hurt anyone.'Madoc Roswyn laughed a soft forlorn laugh. 'The sad truth is that I didn’t care-which may be worse.'
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'When one deals with the Murthe, the unthinkable becomes the ordinary, and Zanzel's repute carries no more weight than last year's mouse-dropping - if that much.'
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Die then. This is my cure for sore knees.
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I challenge Destiny, yes, but I do not leap off cliffs.
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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.