Quote

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

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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
Book
Suppose
Thing
Least
Stop
Alone
Books
Less
Read
Anytime
Individual
Frequently

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
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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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
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
Jack Vance
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I never worked in an office in my life.
Jack Vance
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
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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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
Jack Vance
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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.
Jack Vance
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Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.
Jack Vance
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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
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I give dignity second place to expedience.
Jack Vance
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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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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.
Jack Vance