Quote

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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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
Absolutes
Undeniable
Real
Orthodoxy
Good
Facility
Uncertain
Denied
Relative
Uncertainty
Formulations
Ease
Uncertainties

More quotes by Jack Vance

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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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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.
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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.
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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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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
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I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
Jack Vance
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Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.
Jack Vance
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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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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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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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Good music always defeats bad luck
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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.
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
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I'd never been published when I was young.
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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Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
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.
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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 haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.
Jack Vance