Tanith Lee Quotes

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

Create a world in which these things do or do not exist, or in which they are extended in some way. Test reality against this fiction. The reader will recognize the world that you're talking about, even though it may be another one altogether.

'The Man In High Castle' is one of Dick's most imaginative and captivating works, and certainly one of my favorites.

I've always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find a really exciting thought.

Now, for the first time, he's seeing that there really is a way out of this, and it's all so simple. You don't have to run away. You just meet somebody special and step sideways into a parallel universe.

I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.

I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where I got to become a pulpy science fiction writer.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface.

I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.

'The Man in the High Castle' is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel.

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.

'Fringe' is a sci-fi show. But once you go beyond the genre, you're immersed in a profound reality.

In Japan, there's a TV series called Jin. It deals with time travel. I like stories about time travel. It's a story about people living in modern day that travel back to the Edo era. Those things really interest me.

There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.

I like that the 'Underworld' series created a whole other world that's totally different yet familiar to our own.

I love J. G. Ballard. I love authors who take the world as we know it and just tweak one thing and say, 'What if the world were like this?'

I like going back in time and writing historical fantasy. I use some real historical characters as a background to give depth to the fantasy. And I throw my fictional characters into the midst of this, and, so far, it has turned out interesting.

I want to create a world where all the rules are different. It should be magical to enter.

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'