Life & Wisdom Quote by Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee is side-eyeing the whole bookshelf. With a few clean sentences, she deflates the comforting idea that genre is a natural law rather than a marketing tool, a reader’s habit, a library’s filing system. “Writing is writing” has the plainspoken bluntness of someone who’s watched critics build ornate fences around the same basic human act: arranging language to produce an effect. “Stories are stories” doubles down, insisting that plot, mood, voice, and obsession don’t suddenly become different species because a dragon showed up.

The sly pivot is “Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction.” Even that binary, she implies, is a convenience we cling to when the borders get messy. Lee wrote across fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and fairy-tale retellings; she knew how often “genre” functions as permission (to be strange, lush, excessive) and as dismissal (to be unserious). Her line reads like a defense of imaginative writing and a critique of the gatekeeping that polices it.

Then comes the needle: “And even there, who can be sure?” That’s not relativism for sport. It’s a reminder that non-fiction is narrative craft wearing a badge, and fiction is full of lived truth smuggled in as invention. Memory edits. Research selects. Voice persuades. Lee’s intent is liberating and slightly ominous: if categories can’t guarantee honesty or value, the only real test is the work itself - what it makes you feel, what it makes you see, and how artfully it gets away with it.