Your analyses at times border upon the mordant. - Jack Vance

I gathered that the old fellow suffers from some advanced form of senile dementia, and so perhaps his analysis is not totally accurate.

“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.’”

The curious race, the Earthers. Young, only a few years removed from savagery, contaminated by the past, correspondingly exuberant and direct.