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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Jack Vance

Image
I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
Jack Vance
Image
Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
Jack Vance
Image
I'd never been published when I was young.
Jack Vance
Image
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.
Jack Vance
Image
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.
Jack Vance
Image
Notice this rent in my garment I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.
Jack Vance
Image
But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.
Jack Vance
Image
In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
Jack Vance
Image
I do read books. I suppose it's more or less the same thing, but at least I'm alone and I'm an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.
Jack Vance
Image
Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
Jack Vance
Image
Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.
Jack Vance
Image
I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
Jack Vance
Image
I give dignity second place to expedience.
Jack Vance
Image
I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
Jack Vance
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
Jack Vance
Image
Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
Jack Vance
Image
Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
Jack Vance
Image
Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
Jack Vance