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

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Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
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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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I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.
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A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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I'd never been published when I was young.
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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.
Jack Vance
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Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. —Popular aphorism.
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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.
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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 was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.
Jack Vance