Jack Vance Quotes

The symbologist made a cryptic sign. “That remains to be seen, as the cat said who voided into the sugar bowl.”

“Be on your way; this is holy soil.”
“How can you be so sure? It looks like ordinary dirt.”

My great pleasure is creation—of this I never tire. Some of my guests have complained of a gentle melancholy which hangs in the air; I agree that the mood exists. The explanation, I believe, arises from the fugacity of beauty, the tragic pavanne to which all of us step.

What good is notoriety if your friends are unable to profit from it?

Candor is never indiscreet. Truth, which is to say, the reflection of life, is beautiful.

Art implies discipline; the more excellent the art, the more rigorous the discipline.

I am an unhappy man. I am haunted by my inability to express the inexpressible, to come to terms with the unknown. The pursuit of beauty is, of course, a major psychological drive. It its various guises—which is to say, the urge to perfection, the yearning to merge with the eternal, the explorer’s restlessness, the realization of an Absolute created by ourselves, yet larger than our totality—it is perhaps the most important human thrust.

There is too much knowledge already in the world; we use facts as crutches, to the impoverishment of our senses. Facts are falsehoods; logic is deceit. I know a single system of communication: the declaiming of poetry.

I have much to say about the world, but every year the compulsion dwindles. Let them live and die; it is all one to me.

A man without friends is a tree without leaves.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit—well, intense? Are people really interested in these matters?”
“If not they should be.”
“Easily said, but it’s no way to run a magazine. People don’t want to really understand anything; they want to think they have learned without the necessity of application.”

The central problem, so it seemed, was to learn from whose eye he looked forth. Much, after all, would depend upon his viewpoint.

Money lost, little lost.
Honor lost, much lost.
Pluck lost, all lost.

“And thereby hangs a tale,” as the monkey said while describing the cat’s rear-quarters.

A detached attitude toward the problems of others is not illegal.