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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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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
Accounts
Accommodations
Conscience
Triumphs
Victory
Trillion
Pieces
Victories
Composite
Race
Kills
Composites
History
Technical
Accommodation
True
Account
Mosaic
Men
Triumph
Mosaics

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
Jack Vance
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Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.
Jack Vance
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Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.
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I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
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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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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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Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.
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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.
Jack Vance
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I'd never been published when I was young.
Jack Vance
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But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.
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Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.
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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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.
Jack Vance
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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.
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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 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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Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
Jack Vance