Art & Creativity Quote by Jack Vance

Jack Vance is puncturing the romantic myth of the writer as a kind of inspired conduit. The line lands because it treats waste as normal, even necessary: not a tragic failure, not a tortured confession, just the unglamorous mechanics of making something that actually works. His blunt phrasing - "utterly useless", "just throw it away" - isn’t self-laceration so much as craft discipline. In Vance’s world, prose isn’t sacred; it’s a tool. If a tool doesn’t fit the job, you don’t frame it.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two modern temptations: hoarding every draft as evidence of productivity, and treating "good writing" as something that should survive on the strength of its sentences alone. Vance implies the opposite. A passage can be clever, lyrical, even technically impressive, and still be wrong because it distorts the story’s internal physics - tone, pacing, point of view, the particular moral temperature of a scene. "You can't use it" is almost brutal in its simplicity: narrative is an ecosystem, not a gallery.

Context matters because Vance was a stylist with an almost ornamental precision. Hearing him talk about discarding pages suggests how much of that elegance is engineered. The casual "countless times" is the real flex: mastery isn’t never writing badly; it’s being unsentimental enough to delete what doesn’t serve the spell.