Jack Vance
Jack Vance
John Holbrook "Jack" Vancewas an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer. Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote 9 mystery novels using his full name John Holbrook Vance, three under the pseudonym Ellery Queen, and one each using the pseudonyms Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse. Some editions of his published works give his year of birth as 1920...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 August 1916
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
the reality is it costs a lot of money.
It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.
How to know, oh how to know! All is relative ease and facility in orthodoxy, yet how can it be denied that good is in itself undeniable? Absolutes are the most uncertain of all formulations, while the uncertainties are the most real...
You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.
Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party whether he realizes it or not must always come out the worse.
Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.
I don't have much vanity. I just know what I do. I just do because I'm capable of doing it and do it easily without any pretentiousness.
So I'll write it, and then I'll find out that I actually wrote something that is utterly useless. You can't use it in the story and it doesn't fit. So I just throw it away. I've done that countless times.
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.
Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty.
I give dignity second place to expedience.
The life we've been leading couldn't last forever. It's a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.
If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.