His decision was preordained, and derived from a perverse quirk in his mentality. At his deepest, most essential level, Hack knew himself for an insi… - Jack Vance

Your character, Apollon Zamp, is marred by a certain paltriness of spirit, a diffused universal distrust which I truly deplore.

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.

“We suspect that telepathy occurs instantaneously, if no faster—”
“How could anything be faster than instantaneously?” Margaret inquired.
“It could arrive before it started. In which case it’s called precognition.”
“Oh.”
“In any event it seems that thought is a different stuff from our usual matter, that it obeys different laws, acts through a different medium, in a different dimension set, in short, works through a different space—implying a different universe.”
Tarbert frowned. “You’re getting a little carried away; you’re using the word ‘thought’ rather too easily. After all, what is ‘thought’? So far as we know, it’s a word to describe a complex of electrical and chemical processes in our brains, these more elaborate, but intrinsically no more mysterious, than the operation of a computer. With all the goodwill and predisposition in the world, I can’t see how ‘thought’ can work metaphysical miracles.”