Quote

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
Past
Adventure
Light
Wine
Good
Places
Taste
Wines
Among
Adventures
Dead
Colored
Alive
Discuss
Opportunity
Lights

More quotes by Jack Vance

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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.
Jack Vance
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I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
Jack Vance
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A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.
Jack Vance
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I never worked in an office in my life.
Jack Vance
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
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 was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
Jack Vance
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This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.
Jack Vance
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
Jack Vance
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I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man's accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.
Jack Vance
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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
Jack Vance
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Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.
Jack Vance
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
Jack Vance
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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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I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
Jack Vance
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As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
Jack Vance
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The inscrutability [of economics] is perhaps not unintentional. It gives endless employment to dialecticians who otherwise might become public charges or, at very worst, swindlers and tricksters.
Jack Vance
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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.
Jack Vance
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I'd never been published when I was young.
Jack Vance