George R. R. Martin Quotes
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Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.
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I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.
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An awful lot of fantasy, and even some great fantasy, falls into the mistake of assuming that a good man will be a good king, that all that is necessary is to be a decent human being and when you're king everything will go swimmingly.
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Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
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I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.
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You want people to be eager for your book; the downside is when the people forget the series even exists.
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I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.
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You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.
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I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.
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There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.
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I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?
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I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
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Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.
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As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.
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I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.
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Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it's going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don't know if they're going to live or die.
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I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.
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I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
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I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You're not limited to any particular running time.
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I spent a whole summer working on what proved to be 'A Game of Thrones'.
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If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.
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There is magic in my universe, but it's pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
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Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
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I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.