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I give dignity second place to expedience.

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
Second
Place
Give
Giving
Expedience
Dignity

More quotes by 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.
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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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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I'd never been published when I was young.
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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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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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 just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
Jack Vance
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
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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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
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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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
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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But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.
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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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 never worked in an office in my life.
Jack Vance
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Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know.
Jack Vance