Art & Creativity Quote by Tanith Lee

Writing, for Tanith Lee, is less a gift to the audience than a kind of possession. Calling it “selfish” sounds like a confession, but it’s really a rebuke to the polite fiction that art is service work: the author dutifully producing meaning “for” someone. Lee refuses that transaction. She frames composition as an altered state where the usual social coordinates vanish - no imagined reader to please, no carefully managed self-image to express. That’s not modesty; it’s a claim about how the best writing actually happens: not as performance, but as compulsion.

The sly turn is the second clause. She isn’t writing for “another person,” but she also isn’t writing for herself. That paradox is the point. It suggests a third thing that’s neither audience nor ego: the story itself, with its own gravity, pulling language into shape. In Lee’s case - a writer celebrated for lush fantasy, gothic intensity, and dream-logic worlds - the idea tracks. Her work often feels like it’s arriving from somewhere slightly off-register, governed by atmosphere and image more than by moral messaging or market logic.

The subtext is a defense against two pressures that haunt professional writers: the demand to be relatable and the demand to be intentional. Lee implies that intention, in the managerial sense, can be a creative lie. By stripping away the “for,” she protects the private, irrational engine of invention - and quietly tells readers that if the work reaches them, it’s as an aftershock, not the mission statement.