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

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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.
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I never worked in an office in my life.
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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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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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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 was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.
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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
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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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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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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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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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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
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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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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.
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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.
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