Tanith Lee Quotes - Page 3

Robespierre, crippled and blind, has yet to be healed to the knowledge that service - his desire - is a deed of savage-speaking gentleness, not soft-spoken savagery.

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me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing.

I tend not to analyse my work, though I'm frequently intrigued when other people take time to do so.

No one more cynical than an idealist.

In the usual way I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of "normal" work. In my twenties some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was twenty-seven before my adult novel, The Birthgrave, was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. It felt like a rescue from damnation, and still does.

If anyone ever wonders why there's nothing coming from me, it's not my fault. I'm doing the work. No, I haven't deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can't get anything into print. And apparently I'm not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. In my own case, the more disturbing element is the editor-in-chief who said to me, "I think this book is terrific. It ought to be in print. I can't publish it -- I've been told I mustn't." The indication is that I'm not writing what people want to read, but I never did.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

Some writers, of course, simply write, as they feel they are driven to do, by outer/inner inspirations. If, after the work is written and, hopefully, published, others respond -- that is the Champagne. But we, or some of us, don't write for the Champagne. We write because we write.

You should visit before you pass judgment on a place.

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

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.

It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.

There was no violence, no speed. It moved to the rhythm of an elder dance, putting all the rituals of the world to shame. Black, silver, gold and moon-opal, night and sea, fire, earth, air and water.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

People are always the start for meanimals. When I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings,immortals, the deadthese are all people to me.

Im 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 Im very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

Im a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction.

Pirates have always fascinated me.

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

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.

What is any of this to us? Time is endless and ours. Love and Death are only the games we play in it.

She looked, and a scarlet butterfly flew away from her, away down the length of the tower, and then another, another, an unraveling scarf of butterflies like winged blood.

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.

Condemned and executioner with aren't coupled in a primitive rite.

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