I'd never been published when I was young..

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

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….

I never worked in an office in my life..

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 n….

Vance has a genius in evoking the beauty of strangeness, the strangeness of beauty..

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

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

Truth" is contained in the preconceptions of him who seeks to define it. Any organization of ideas whatever presupposes a judgment on the world..

Happiness is fugitive; dissatisfaction and boredom are real..

I haven't been to a movie since somebody gave me free tickets to Star Wars, which I went to..

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

I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet..

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

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

Since we are not permitted to act, we are obliged to know..

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

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

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

Jack Vance's Lyonesse books are the greatest fairy tale of the twentieth century..

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 ….