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Love Quote by Tanith Lee

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

About this Quote

There is a particular kind of candor in admitting influence, especially for a writer like Tanith Lee whose voice arrived so fully formed that readers often treat it as sui generis. By saying she “love[s] writers all across the board,” Lee disarms the anxious hierarchy-making that shadows literary talk: high versus low, genre versus “literary,” prestige versus pleasure. It’s a cosmopolitan flex that also reads like self-defense. She’s refusing to be pinned to a single lineage even as she’s about to name one.

Then she does: “one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.” The specificity matters. “Very directly” is a claim of craft, not just admiration. Renault, famed for her lucid, sensual historical novels of ancient Greece, offered a model for how to smuggle transgressive intimacy and psychological complexity into settings that look safely “classical.” For a young Lee coming up in a culture that still treated fantasy and science fiction as second-class, Renault’s approach is a quiet permission slip: you can write desire, myth, violence, and beauty with seriousness and narrative velocity; you can build worlds that feel researched without sounding dutiful.

The phrase “at the beginning” also signals evolution. Lee isn’t living under Renault’s shadow; she’s mapping an origin point. Subtextually, she’s telling you how an imaginative life gets made: not from pure inspiration, but from finding one predecessor who makes the door feel usable, then walking through it into your own stranger rooms.

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TopicWriting
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Lee, Tanith. (2026, January 15). I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-love-writers-all-across-the-board-but-one-who-145278/

Chicago Style
Lee, Tanith. "I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-love-writers-all-across-the-board-but-one-who-145278/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-love-writers-all-across-the-board-but-one-who-145278/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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I love writers all across the board, Mary Renault influenced me
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About the Author

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Tanith Lee (September 19, 1947 - May 24, 2015) was a Writer from United Kingdom.

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