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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
Since
Permitted
Obliged

More quotes by 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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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
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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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
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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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
Jack Vance
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I'd never been published when I was young.
Jack Vance
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
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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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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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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Good music always defeats bad luck
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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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
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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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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
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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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
Jack Vance