Life & Wisdom Quote by A. E. van Vogt

Van Vogt’s self-portrait is a quiet demolition of the myth that great writers are minted in salons. He calls himself “bright but simple,” a phrase that does double duty: it lowers the reader’s guard while staking a claim to raw intelligence untutored by the literary “scene.” The Canada detail matters, too. It signals distance from the metropolitan circuits that confer prestige, suggesting an outsider who arrived at influence without the usual social scaffolding.

The slyest move is “seldom, if ever, met another writer.” It’s not just biography; it’s a cultural argument about how art gets made. Van Vogt is positioning his imagination as largely self-generated, shaped less by workshops and peer pressure than by solitary appetite and whatever was available to read. That’s particularly resonant coming from a science fiction giant whose work often feels like it was beamed in from a private frequency: strange logic, accelerated plot, and systems thinking unbothered by realist etiquette.

Then he punctures “writer” with “so-called literary type,” a phrase that carries a gentle sneer. He’s separating the act of writing from the identity of being a Writer. The “occasionally sold a story” line implies precariousness; the “worked in an office” twist lands as class commentary. This is a world where creativity is squeezed into evenings, and the credentialed aura of literature looks like a costume worn over a day job.

Contextually, it reads like an explanation for his independence: an author formed in the margins, who didn’t need a gatekeeping culture to validate the work, and maybe didn’t trust that culture’s taste anyway.