A biography for George R. R. Martinhasn’t been written yet.
“All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.”
“The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.”
“Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.”
“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 some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.”
“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.”
“I've never been a fast writer.”
“You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.”
“I tend to write one character at a time. But I don't write the entirety of one character at a time.”
“Of course it's not enough to be a good man to be an effective ruler and it never has been.”
“I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings.”