Life & Wisdom Quote by A. E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt is admitting, with disarming practicality, that his sense of “interesting” is inseparable from the way text looks on the page. The line isn’t a lofty manifesto about style; it’s a working writer’s confession that pacing is partly visual architecture. A “solid page” reads like a wall. Paragraph breaks are doors, breaths, camera cuts. Van Vogt is telling you he doesn’t just write stories; he engineers momentum.

The subtext is mildly heretical: readability outranks orthodoxy. By conceding he breaks “perhaps sooner than I should,” he acknowledges the gatekeepers of “proper” English usage, then shrugs and does it anyway. That small self-accusation functions as a preemptive defense against critics who equate density with seriousness. Van Vogt’s preference implies a different metric: if the reader’s eye stalls, the fiction fails, no matter how correct the grammar.

Context matters. Van Vogt came up in the pulp and Golden Age science fiction ecosystem, where narrative velocity was currency and publication formats rewarded punchy, modular prose. Short paragraphs aren’t laziness here; they’re a technology for suspense, allowing revelations and reversals to land cleanly and keeping the reader moving through strange ideas without getting bogged down.

There’s also an almost cinematic sensibility in the claim: paragraphing as editing. He’s describing an intuition many contemporary writers (and web readers) share, decades early: attention is fragile, and form can either collaborate with it or fight it.