"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"
About this Quote
Childhood ambition is supposed to be a cute prophecy; Tanith Lee turns it into a quiet trapdoor. The five-year-old “actress” answer lands like a punchline because it’s framed against the “silly things” other kids choose. She’s not just remembering; she’s staging a scene about seriousness arriving early, the way some children intuit that identity is performance long before they have language for it.
Then she yanks the camera backstage: “So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.” That “of course” is doing sly work. It sounds modest, even inevitable, but it’s also a flex of self-knowledge: the adult narrator recasts the child’s desire as misnamed destiny. Acting and writing aren’t opposites here; they’re adjacent roles. The actress wants to inhabit other selves. The writer does it with total control, casting, lighting, dialogue, endings. If you can’t get on stage, build the stage.
There’s subtext, too, about what girls are permitted to want. “Actress” is a public, visible dream, legible to a classroom. “Writer” is solitary, private, harder to imagine at five, and harder to receive social applause for. Lee’s line folds that tension into one neat reversal: the world asks for a bright costume; she answers with a job that happens mostly in the dark.
Context matters: Lee made her name in fantasy and gothic fiction, genres built on masks, metamorphosis, and voice. The quote reads like an origin story for a career spent proving that the most powerful performances don’t need an audience in the room.
Then she yanks the camera backstage: “So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.” That “of course” is doing sly work. It sounds modest, even inevitable, but it’s also a flex of self-knowledge: the adult narrator recasts the child’s desire as misnamed destiny. Acting and writing aren’t opposites here; they’re adjacent roles. The actress wants to inhabit other selves. The writer does it with total control, casting, lighting, dialogue, endings. If you can’t get on stage, build the stage.
There’s subtext, too, about what girls are permitted to want. “Actress” is a public, visible dream, legible to a classroom. “Writer” is solitary, private, harder to imagine at five, and harder to receive social applause for. Lee’s line folds that tension into one neat reversal: the world asks for a bright costume; she answers with a job that happens mostly in the dark.
Context matters: Lee made her name in fantasy and gothic fiction, genres built on masks, metamorphosis, and voice. The quote reads like an origin story for a career spent proving that the most powerful performances don’t need an audience in the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Tanith
Add to List
