Love Quote by Tanith Lee

Writing, for Tanith Lee, isn’t a craft so much as an alternate climate: a place you enter and a place that enters you. The line lands because it refuses the pious version of authorship (discipline, duty, the noble page) and frames it instead as transport, even addiction. “Magical” sets the mood, but Lee immediately complicates the fantasy by insisting that this elsewhere is “much more dreadful” as well as “much more exciting.” That pairing is the tell. She’s describing imagination not as escapism but as intensification - a realm where dread is sharper, wonder is louder, and the stakes feel more honest than everyday life’s soft-edged compromises.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of the “so-called real world.” Not that reality is fake, but that its official story - what counts as normal, acceptable, worth feeling - can be strangely unreal to people whose inner lives run hotter. Lee, known for gothic, mythic, and genre-bending fiction, is staking a claim for the legitimacy of invented worlds. “Somewhere I feel I belong” turns authorship into citizenship: she’s not visiting fantasy, she’s living there, finding identity and community in the architectures she builds.

The intent, then, is self-justification without apology. She’s explaining why the dark and the dazzling belong together on the page: because that’s where her emotional truth clocks in. The “possibly” at the end keeps it human - a half-smile, a small hedge - even as she admits the real scandal: the imagined can feel more like home than the given.