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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

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Jack Vance
Age: 96 †
Born: 1916
Born: August 28
Died: 2013
Died: May 26
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
San Francisco County
California
John Holbrook Vance
Jack Vance
John H. Vance
Among
Adventures
Dead
Colored
Alive
Discuss
Opportunity
Lights
Past
Adventure
Light
Wine
Good
Places
Taste
Wines

More quotes by Jack Vance

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Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.
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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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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.
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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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I'd never been published when I was young.
Jack Vance
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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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.
Jack Vance
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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
Jack Vance
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
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A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope it's lessening the tension.
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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.
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As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
Jack Vance
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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
Jack Vance
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I give dignity second place to expedience.
Jack Vance