187 Quotes by Jack Vance

Right now I’m so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don’t know what I’d do with it. I don’t travel anymore. I don’t need anything, don’t want anything. I’d give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.

There was a writer in the ’20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.

Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow. – Popular aphorism.

Death is the heritage of life; a man’s vitality is like air in a bladder. Poinct this bubble and away, away, away, flees life, like the color of fading dream.

But I’m so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it’s just so slow, I’m so terribly slow using it.

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.

I worked for half a cent a word. I’m not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.

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

The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible.