George R. R. Martin
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.Collection: Science
I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.Collection: Imagination
I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Religion
There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: War
You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.Collection: Power
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
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.
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.
I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.
I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.
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.
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.
I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.
The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.
There has to be a level of joy of what you're doing.
I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.
I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings.
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 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.
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.
I suppose I'm a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic.
Of course it's not enough to be a good man to be an effective ruler and it never has been.
I spent a whole summer working on what proved to be 'A Game of Thrones'.
There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.
One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.
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 believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.
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 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.
It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.
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.
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.
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.'
Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.
I know some writers can write on the road, but I'm not one of them.
There is magic in my universe, but it's pretty low magic compared to other fantasies.
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.'
I have done a lot of work in Hollywood myself. I worked in television for roughly 10 years, from the mid-'80s to mid-'90s. And I was on staff at a couple of shows. I did some feature films, including originals and adaptations.
I have always been a dark writer.
Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.
I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.
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.
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.
In my 10 years that I spent out in TV and film, I had my shares of frustrations and annoyances and disappointments, but also I think it was, in the long run, it was very good for me in a whole bunch of ways.
I'm one of those writers who say, 'I've enjoy having written.'
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 wrote six pilots, none of which ever got picked up. When you stop trying, it then it falls in your lap.