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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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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
Care
Mirrors
Utmost
Better
Master
Slaughter
Writing
Doctors
Magician
Slaughters
Work
Masters
Chef
Discusses
Room
Writes
Hinges
Writer
Chickens
Prescriptions
Rooms
Latin
Dining
Less
Doctor
Hides

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Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
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Good music always defeats bad luck
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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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.
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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.
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.
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I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
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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.
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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.
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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
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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.
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I'd never been published when I was young.
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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.
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