Jack Vance Quotes

Damned meddlers. It’s hard to know when their curiosity is official and when it’s just curiosity.

Are musicians unlike other men? Beget and forget, that’s how it goes.

My clever baton holds your unnatural sorcery in abeyance.

Urbanized men and women experience not life but the abstraction of life, on ever higher levels of refinement and dislocation from reality. They become processors of ideas, and have evolved such esoteric occupations as the critic, the critic who criticizes criticism, and even the critic who criticizes criticism of criticism. It is a very sad misuse of human talent and energy.

Events rush together. History occurs.

Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.

My brain, otherwise a sound instrument, has a serious defect—a hypertrophied lobe of curiosity.

“Beauty comes in often to drink. A spaceman, he claims himself, but as to this I can’t be certain. I have often declared myself a great lover. All of us lie, as much or more than necessary. ‘What is truth?’ asks Pons Pilatus, in the fable, and I answer: ‘A commodity as cheap as air which we hide as if it were as precious as yewl stone.’”

Remember, not all lawyers are fools!

"What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously.
"I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue."

I'm only giving orders because I'm more efficient and smarter than you are.

“I consider myself a fortunate men, more so than most. I have often wondered why it was given to me to live the life of Kyril Fabrache.”
“These reflections, at one time or another, have occurred to all of us,” said Ifness, “but unless we are agreed upon a religion of gradated reincarnation, the question is ingenuous.”

Consider the human mind! It is capable of amazing feats when used properly. Conversely, without exercise it atrophies to a lump of gray-yellow fat.

Urban folk, dealing as they do in ideas and abstractions, become conditioned to unreality. Then, wherever the fabric of civilization breaks, these people are as helpless as fish out of water.

They call me a renegade.
The epithet is inaccurate and undeserved. I cannot be faithless to a cause which I never have endorsed. Indeed, I am absolutely faithful to the only cause I espouse, which is my own welfare. I take pride in this unswerving loyalty!