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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.

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
Contributed
Reading
Read
Ever
Everything
Book

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
Jack Vance
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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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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
Jack Vance
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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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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
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I'd never been published when I was young.
Jack Vance
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
Jack Vance
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
Jack Vance
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Good music always defeats bad luck
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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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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A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope it's lessening the tension.
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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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
Jack Vance
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
Jack Vance
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
Jack Vance