Life & Wisdom Quote by A. E. van Vogt

Van Vogt’s line has the slippery modesty of someone admitting influence while still insisting on agency. “In a sense” is the tell: a hedge that concedes “there’s a great truth” (to whatever claim preceded it) without surrendering the whole argument. He validates the outside explanation - luck, zeitgeist, innate talent, the pulp ecosystem - then quietly pivots. The real punch sits after the “but”: “also I was a great reader.” Not just a reader, not even an avid one, but “great,” a word that reframes reading as craft, discipline, even competitive advantage.

The subtext is defensive and savvy. Science fiction, especially mid-century pulp, was often treated as disposable, its writers assumed to be improvisers cranking out spectacle. Van Vogt counters that stereotype by pointing to input, not inspiration: his imagination is presented as an engine fed by volume and range. It’s an implicit theory of artistic formation that resists romantic myths. He’s saying: yes, the world shaped me, but I also built myself by what I consumed.

Context matters because van Vogt’s career sits inside an era when “serious” literature and genre were policed as separate neighborhoods. Claiming the identity of a “great reader” is a quiet bid for legitimacy: I belong to the long conversation of books, not just the quick churn of magazines. It also hints at method. Van Vogt’s famously propulsive, idea-dense plotting reads like someone who learned narrative the way musicians learn standards: by absorbing patterns until they become reflex.