Quotes

[when asked if any of the cast of his book series, "A Song of Ice and Fire", will be left alive, he joked]: "No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves ..."

[on writing 'The Red Wedding' in A Storm of Swords] That was the hardest scene I've ever had to write. It's two-thirds of the way through the book, but I skipped over it when I came to it. So the entire book was done and there was still that one chapter left. Then I wrote it. It was like murdering two of your children. I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

I had a couple of friends, but I was mostly the kid with his nose in a book.

Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.

Believe it or not, I worked four summers in college as a sports writer covering baseball for a parks and rec department in Bayonne, N.J.

As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

A lot of writing takes place in the subconscious, and it's bound to have an effect.

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.

Of course it's not enough to be a good man to be an effective ruler and it never has been.

The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

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?

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings.

I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.

I have always been a dark writer.

I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.

I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.

I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.

I know some writers can write on the road, but I'm not one of them.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

I watch NFL football on Sundays. I enjoy gaming with friends, meaning role-playing games; I still enjoy going to conventions and traveling.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.

I suppose I'm a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic.

I spent a whole summer working on what proved to be 'A Game of Thrones'.

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.

I've never been a fast writer.

I'm one of those writers who say, 'I've enjoy having written.'

I wrote six pilots, none of which ever got picked up. When you stop trying, it then it falls in your lap.

I worked out of Hollywood for 10 years and I had my heart broken half a dozen times, so I know all the things that can go wrong.

One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.

One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

There has to be a level of joy of what you're doing.

There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.

The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.

The cable makers are the ones who are willing to take risks and do something original and push the envelope some.

'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.

You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.

Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.

Unfortunately in television, for whatever reason, fantasy became thought of as a kids' genre.

There is magic in my universe, but it's pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.

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.

'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.

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.'