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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.

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
Permitted
Obliged
Since

More quotes by 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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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 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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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
Jack Vance
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
Jack Vance
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
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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Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party whether he realizes it or not must always come out the worse.
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
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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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As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.
Jack Vance
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Truth is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world.
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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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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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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.
Jack Vance
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
Jack Vance
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I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
Jack Vance