Top 120 Jack Vance Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The life we’ve been leading couldn’t last forever. It’s a wonder it lasted as long as it did.”

— Jack Vance

2. “What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life.”

— Jack Vance

3. “It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.”

— Jack Vance

4. “The universe is eight billion years old, the last two billion of which have produced intelligent life. During this time not one hour of absolute equity has prevailed.”

— Jack Vance

5. “I do not care to listen; obloquy injures my self-esteem and I am skeptical of praise.”

— Jack Vance

6. “The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.”

— Jack Vance

7. “Good music always defeats bad luck.”

— Jack Vance

8. “Count me not your friend but the enemy of your enemies.”

— Jack Vance

9. “Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic.”

— Jack Vance

10. “Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real.”

— Jack Vance

11. “While we are alive we should sit among colored lights and taste good wines, and discuss our adventures in far places; when we are dead, the opportunity is past.”

— Jack Vance

12. “The young woman quoted Turgenev, “If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly or even harm him, you reproach him with every defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself.”

— Jack Vance

13. “I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.”

— Jack Vance

14. “There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.”

— Jack Vance

15. “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.”

— Jack Vance

16. “The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence. The writer must put no obstacles in the reader’s way. Therefore I try avoid words that he must puzzle over, or that he cannot gloss from context; and when I make up names, I shun the use of diacritical marks that he must sound out, thus halting the flow; and in general, I try to keep the sentences metrically pleasing, so that they do not obtrude upon the reader’s mind.”

— Jack Vance

17. “I’d never been published when I was young.”

— Jack Vance

18. “I never worked in an office in my life.”

— Jack Vance

19. “I haven’t sold to the movies. In other words, I haven’t gotten any enormous checks yet.”

— Jack Vance

20. “Beauty compelled admiration and erotic yearning; such was its organic function. But never by itself could it command love.”

— Jack Vance

21. “Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.”

— Jack Vance

22. “The less a writer discusses his work and himself the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.”

— Jack Vance

23. “Jack Vance’s Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century.”

— Jack Vance

24. “I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.”

— Jack Vance

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

— Jack Vance

26. “When we shattered the Actuarian, we shattered the bar across the sky. Now, life, eternal life, is at anyone’s demand. Man must move forward; this is the nature of his brain and blood. Today he is given the Earth; his destiny is the stars. The entire universe awaits him! And so, why should we quaver and hedge at life for all of us?”

— Jack Vance

27. “Of all questions, why? is the least pertinent. It begs the question; it assumes the larger part of its own response; to wit, that a sensible response exists.”

— Jack Vance

28. “Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty.”

— Jack Vance

29. “I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.”

— Jack Vance

30. “Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience.”

— Jack Vance

31. “An inch of foreknowledge is worth ten miles of after-thought.”

— Jack Vance

32. “I am Chun the Unavoidable. Tonight, O Lith, tonight it is two long bright threads for you.”

— Jack Vance

33. “Nothing is more conspicuous than a farting princess.”

— Jack Vance

34. “Within and about the Forest of Tantrevalles existed a hundred or more fairy shees, each the castle of a fairy tribe. Thripsey Shee on Madling Meadow, little more than a mile within the precincts of the forest, was ruled by King Throbius and his spouse Queen Bossum. His realm included Madling Meadow and as much of the forest surrounding as was consistent with his dignity. The fairies at Thripsey numbered eighty-six.”

— Jack Vance

35. “I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.”

— Jack Vance

36. “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.”

— Jack Vance

37. “Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.”

— Jack Vance

38. “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.”

— Jack Vance

39. “We prostrate ourselves before the fish-god Yob, who seems as efficacious as any.”

— Jack Vance

40. “I am not Cugel the Clever for nothing!”

— Jack Vance

41. “It occurs to me that the man and his religion are one and the same thing. The unknown exists. Each man projects on the blankness the shape of his own particular world-view. He endows his creation with his personal volitions and attitudes. The religious man stating his case is in essence explaining himself. When a fanatic is contradicted he feels a threat to his own existence; he reacts violently.”

— Jack Vance

42. “Observe! I hold the magic tablet of truth! You are Monster; I am Man. Each is alone; each sees dawn and dusk; each feels pain and pain’s ease. Why should one be victor and the other victim? We will never agree; never shall you know gain by the toil of man! Submit to the what-must-be! If you fail to heed, then you must taste a bitter brew and never again walk the sands of dark Sigil.”

— Jack Vance

43. “The pre-dawn air was quiet and cool; the sky showed the colors of citron, pearl, and apricot, which were reflected from the sea. Out from the Tumbling River estuary drifted the black ship Smaadra, propelled across the water by its sweeps. A mile offshore, the sweeps were shipped. The yards were raised, sails sheeted taut and back-stays set up. With the sunrise came breeze; the ship glided quickly and quietly into the east, and presently Troicinet had become a shadow along the horizon.”

— Jack Vance

44. “But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.”

— Jack Vance

45. “A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.”

— Jack Vance

46. “The forest of Tantrevalles shades a deep dank soil; somewhere under this mold lies the carcass of a snake which in better times used the name Visbhume; he no longer tippety-taps and moves and jerks to the rhythms of a propulsive inner music; and sometimes one wonders in cases like this: here is the dead thing; where has the music gone?”

— Jack Vance

47. “At the last moments of the universe, with eternal darkness converging from all sides, surely someone will arise and cry out: ‘Hold back the end for a final moment, while I pay tribute to the gallant brewmasters who have provided us a pathway of golden glory down the fading corridors of time!’ And then, is it not possible that a bright gap will appear in the dark, through which the brewmasters are allowed to proceed, to build a finer universe?”

— Jack Vance

48. “A barbarian is not aware that he is a barbarian.”

— Jack Vance

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

— Jack Vance

50. “I give dignity second place to expedience.”

— Jack Vance