Tanith Lee

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.

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

I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.

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

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

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

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 also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there’s so much in those films and I don’t care if it’s stereotyped.

I’ve been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

Pirates have always fascinated me.

I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.

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 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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

No one is ever ordinary.

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