Life & Wisdom Quote by A. E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt’s line lands with the offhand candor of someone trying to reassert authorship after the world has run away with his idea. “Well, first of all” is a throat-clearer, the verbal equivalent of taking back the microphone. It frames what follows as damage control: not a grand theory, just a “thought of mine” that somehow got inflated into Dianetics, a movement with its own mythology, money, and machinery.

The phrasing does quiet, strategic work. “Going off with dianetics” makes the whole affair sound like a detour, a youthful binge, a side quest rather than a defining collaboration. Even “based upon” is carefully lawyerly: it claims origin without claiming responsibility for the finished product. Van Vogt positions himself as the seed, not the gardener. In one clause he asserts influence and disowns consequence.

Context sharpens the edge. Van Vogt, a major science fiction writer, moved in the mid-century ecosystem where speculative ideas, pop psychology, and self-improvement schemes traded DNA freely. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics drew on that milieu, and van Vogt has been repeatedly discussed as one of the writers whose narrative devices and pseudo-scientific structures helped set the stage. The quote reads like an attempt to correct the record without inviting a lawsuit or a cult’s wrath: yes, I sparked something; no, I didn’t build the fire.

The subtext is authorial anxiety in the age of franchised belief. Van Vogt is insisting on intellectual paternity while quietly signaling regret at what the child became.