Quotes from Jack Vance

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

This flattery has been rather slow in coming. I think all of sudden late in life now I'm getting some credit for what I've done. Which is gratifying, but it's kind of a little late.

I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

I haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to.

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.

Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience.

Good music always defeats bad luck

When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.

Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

One becomes sated with platitudes no less than honey, so that one often breaks another's bones in one's vexation.

In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.

It seems to limit you; when you're working in an office, you're a creature in a small cell under somebody's supervision and surveillance.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

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.

Twango's hospitality, though largely symbolic, does him credit.

Until work has reached its previous stage nympharium privileges are denied to all.

I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.

I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.

But Roy Rockwood, it was science fiction for the sake of science fiction.

I don't read other science fiction. I don't read any at all.

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.

I'd never been published when I was young.

I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.