Quote

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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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
Come
Worse
Disequilibrium
Must
Balance
Transaction
Even
Achieve
Stimulated
Always
Realizing
Interactions
Never
Party
Favorable
Whether
Realizes
Human
Transactions
Humans
Interaction

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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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I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.
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Good music always defeats bad luck
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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.
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I never worked in an office in my life.
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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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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.
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I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.
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I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.
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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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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.
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I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.
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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.
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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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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
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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.
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
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Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.
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I give dignity second place to expedience.
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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.
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