Life & Wisdom Quote by A. E. van Vogt

Van Vogt is treating creativity less like lightning and more like logistics: a career managed in decades, with a predictable expiration date. The casually tossed-off "I figure" is doing real work here. It signals a mind that distrusts romantic myths about inspiration and instead tries to quantify the unquantifiable. In a genre built on imagining future systems, he turns the systems-thinking back onto himself.

The "ten year cycle" reads like both personal superstition and hard-won pattern recognition. Science fiction writers of his era were often production machines, feeding pulps, serializing ideas, training themselves to generate premises on command. That pace creates a quiet terror: what happens when the inner engine sputters? Van Vogt names it bluntly, almost clinically: "what is known as the writer's block". The phrasing creates distance, as if writer's block is an external condition you "run into", not an internal collapse. It's self-protection. If the block is a thing out there, you can plan around it, outmaneuver it, treat it as an occupational hazard rather than a verdict.

The subtext is aging and mortality without melodrama. A ten-year cycle is a way of mapping time when your livelihood depends on novelty. At the end of each cycle, the worry isn't just that the sentences won't come; it's that the self who could make them has used up his best fuel. Van Vogt's power move is admitting that fear while insisting it can be anticipated, maybe even negotiated.