Top 120 Jack Vance Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Uncertainty hurts more than ignorance.”

— Jack Vance

52. “What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace and egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men.”

— Jack Vance

53. “This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.”

— Jack Vance

54. “I haven’t been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to.”

— Jack Vance

55. “I dare not kill you. But I can break more bones, and you will walk sideways like a crab.”

— Jack Vance

56. “I hate you with the hate that I give to all the world; I love you with a feeling nothing else arouses.”

— Jack Vance

57. “How I hate you,” he said softly. “If hate were stone I could build a tower into the clouds.”

— Jack Vance

58. “Star-watching: at night the stars of Alastor Cluster blaze in profusion. The atmosphere refracts their light; the sky quivers with beams, glitters, and errant flashes. The Trills go out into their gardens with jugs of wine; they name the stars and discusses localities. For the Trills, for almost anyone of Alastor, the night sky was no abstract empyrean, but rather a view across prodigious distances to known places: a vast luminous map.”

— Jack Vance

59. “I would offer congratulations were it not for this tentacle gripping my leg.”

— Jack Vance

60. “It is thus because it has always been thus. Is not this reason enough?”

— Jack Vance

61. “Now then!” cried Vita Palas. “Don’t you go slanging me, you raddled old hussy! I know your kind, all skin and spleen, and wrinkles to wrap over all! Your own morals are sewage, you with your dancing-boys and gigolos! Don’t you try slanging me any more, or I’ll snatch off your wig and really explain what I think of you! It will not be nice! It will turn your long nose blue!”

— Jack Vance

62. “I do read books. I suppose it’s more or less the same thing, but at least I’m alone and I’m an individual. I can stop anytime I want, which I frequently do.”

— Jack Vance

63. “The world now lacks a ” Sir Pom-pom”, with all his funny ways! I wonder where he is now? Or is he anywhere at all? Can someone be nowhere?”

— Jack Vance

64. “As I mentioned, I was a carpenter for a time.”

— Jack Vance

65. “Everyone is the same,” he told himself. “Anxious to arrive. And when they leave, wondering why they came.”

— Jack Vance

66. “Two hours of loose philosophizing will never tilt the scale against the worth of one sound belch.”

— Jack Vance

67. “When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.”

— Jack Vance

68. “Why make plans? The sun might well go out tomorrow.”

— Jack Vance

69. “An enemy, perhaps. Ah, so simple. Liane will kill you ten men. Two steps forward, thrust – thus!” He lunged. “And souls go thrilling up like bubbles in a beaker of mead.”

— Jack Vance

70. “I must cite an intrinsic condition of the universe. We set forth in any direction which seems convenient; each leads to the same place: the end of the universe.”

— Jack Vance

71. “I live in a constant flux; I am unable to make fixed plans.”

— Jack Vance

72. “I admit to a specialized occupation, which in fact has not so much as acquired a name. Not to put too keen an edge on it, I wait under gallows until the corpse drops, whereupon I assume possession of the clothes and valuables. I find little competition in the field; the work is dull, and I will never become wealthy, but at least it is honest, and I have time to daydream.”

— Jack Vance

73. “You are young; you have hopes. One by one they will go, and nothing will be left but the bare fact of life.”

— Jack Vance

74. “I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.”

— Jack Vance

75. “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.”

— Jack Vance

76. “Dismount and kneel before me, that I may strike off your head with fullest ease. You shall die in this tragic golden light of sunset.”

— Jack Vance

77. “I was an omnivore at reading, so that everything I ever read contributed.”

— Jack Vance

78. “We hold that gain after toil, triumph after adversity, achievement to a goal long-sought, is a greater beneficence than prebendary nutrient from the teat of an indulgent government.”

— Jack Vance

79. “I don’t know nothing for sure, except water runs downhill and I gotta pay my rent.”

— Jack Vance

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

— Jack Vance

81. “Where cowards never venture, heroes find splendor. So.”

— Jack Vance

82. “If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.”

— Jack Vance

83. “What are your fees?” inquired Guyal cautiously. “I respond to three questions,” stated the augur. “For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”

— Jack Vance

84. “The secret, so Shimrod knew, was never to accept the fairies’ terms, but always to close the deal on one’s own stipulations, otherwise the bargain was sure to turn sour.”

— Jack Vance

85. “I have transcended that phase in my intellectual growth where I discover humour in simple freakishness. What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since wherever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapours rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter.”

— Jack Vance

86. “Every story has, or should have, a mood: the connective tissue which holds the story together. In this regard some writers are adroit, others don’t have a clue.”

— Jack Vance

87. “I become drunk as circumstances dictate.”

— Jack Vance

88. “Living creatures, if nothing else, have the right to life. It is their only truly precious possession, and the stealing of life is a wicked theft.”

— Jack Vance

89. “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.”

— Jack Vance

90. “In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.”

— Jack Vance

91. “I thought that automobiles were going to have mufflers and go fast and airplanes were going to fly fast.”

— Jack Vance

92. “I am not partial to folk who are grim and austere. I prefer fanciful folk who make me laugh.”

— Jack Vance

93. “I know that the history of man is not his technical triumphs, his kills, his victories. It is a composite, a mosaic of a trillion pieces, the account of each man’s accommodation with his conscience. This is the true history of the race.”

— Jack Vance

94. “Let us leave this room, said Melancthe. It reeks of the brain.”

— Jack Vance

95. “Bending, she kissed Glawen’s cheek. “Thank you for a lovely day.” “Wait!” cried Glawen. “Come back!” “I think not,” said Wayness, and ran off up the path to Riverview House.”

— Jack Vance

96. “Somewhere there is mystery. It impels one to theosophy: to the worship of a space-god, or a god of light.” “Theory dissolves the mystery, though it lays bare a cryptic new stratum. Quite likely there is an endless set of these layers, mystery below mystery.”

— Jack Vance

97. “In fact, almost every job you get somebody watching you.”

— Jack Vance

98. “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.”

— Jack Vance

99. “But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.”

— Jack Vance

100. “The world is a place of marvels.”

— Jack Vance