George R. R. Martin Quotes
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I was a novelist first. But in the mid-'80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, 'You know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.'
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There is magic in my universe, but it's pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
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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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One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.
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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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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 spent a whole summer working on what proved to be 'A Game of Thrones'.
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I've never been a fast writer.
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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.
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I grew up with four T.V. channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You gotta wait a week for the next one. I'd mail-order books: take a quarter, get an envelope, send off for it and wait until it arrived. I grew up waiting for things.
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When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.
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I had an encyclopedia with a list of flags in the back, so I would look at all these flags of China and Liberia and England and Denmark and whatever, and I learned all the different flags, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be voyaging on some of these ships.
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Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.
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I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn't the end and there's something more, but I can't convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever.
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'Rome' was one of my favourite shows, and I wish HBO had given it three more seasons 'cause I would have loved to continue watching it.
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When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.
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I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.
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Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.
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I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.
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There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.
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Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'
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I have files, I have computer files and, you know, files on paper. But most of it is really in my head. So God help me if anything ever happens to my head!
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I think that, in all of my time, I got just one fan letter, from an NFL fullback named Darian Barnes. NFL players might not have enough time for my books.
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'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.