Tanith Lee

“I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.”

“The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.”

“I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?”

“I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.”

“At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.”

“Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.”

“Pirates have always fascinated me.”

“I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.”

“I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.”

“No one is ever ordinary.”

“I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!”

“I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.”

“I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.”

“People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me.”

“When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it.”

“As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.”

“If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.”

“I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behavior can distress you, even when it's unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.”

“Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote.”

“It's lovely. I hate it.”