Tanith Lee Quotes
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Now, writing every day, and being paid for it and encouraged to do it, it was as if, in the midst of the clich?d dark and stormy night, I found the magical inn, its windows golden lit, and Summer was due to start tomorrow. I can only work at one thing well. Deprive me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing.
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No one more cynical than an idealist.
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I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.
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I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.
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I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.
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I haven't changed. Something's happened to me, that's all.
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Tales of heroes end in bliss.
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For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.
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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.
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It's lovely. I hate it.
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Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.
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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.
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He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.
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The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that is cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.
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Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. The fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor.
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We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests.
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You should visit before you pass judgment on a place.
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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.
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I was born in North London in 1947. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing.
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Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say.
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Im a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction.
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It was not apathy. It was an intelligent disinterest in those things that could have no bearing on one's existence.
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Maidens who stay maidens turn into saints. Old women become sorceresses. Tough jobs, both of these.
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If I ever get to 100, I'd want to be filled with wonder and wild, adolescent, wide-eyed interest in newness. So let's keep the flame burning. Let's stop thinking everyone over 29, or 49, has to be reinforced by concrete.
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I'm not very good at being alive. Sometimes I despair of ever mastering it, getting it right. When I'm old, perhaps.
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I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else. I will admit to a pleasure and sense of hope in what I see as the basic teachings of Christ, stripped of the nonsense that has sometimes been accumulated about them and the embarrassing misunderstanding.
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It was so useful to lie with the truth.
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Flat or round, there has always been hate in the world.
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I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world.
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Whatever the hell I am, I am Me.
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