Mark Lawrence
When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.
Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too.
I have a slightly crap blog where I opine on anything that occurs to me and run the occasional silly competition.
I manage to read about one book a month, all fantasy these days.
Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you.Collection: Memories
I've always felt that the placement of a man's testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design.Collection: Intelligent
I think maybe we die every day. Maybe we're born new each dawn, a little changed, a little further on our own road. When enough days stand between you and the person you were, you're strangers. Maybe that's what growing up is. Maybe I have grown up.Collection: Growing Up
No half measures. Some things can’t be cut in half. You can’t half-love someone. You can’t half-betray, or half-lie.Collection: Lying
A fool may scrawl on a slate and if no one has the wit to wipe it clean for a thousand years, the scrawl becomes the wisdom of ages.Collection: Years
Every man has his thorns, not of him, but in him, deep as bones.Collection: Men
We’re built of contradictions, all of us. It’s those opposing forces that give us strength, like an arch, each block pressing the next. Give me a man whose parts are all aligned in agreement and I’ll show you madness. We walk a narrow path, insanity to each side. A man without contradictions to balance him will soon veer off.Collection: Block
Let's go to Valhalla with the sun on our faces.Collection: Valhalla
We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.Collection: Men
When you take a woman away from her man, what you get is a woman who can be taken away from her man.Collection: Taken
When you're in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It's a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.Collection: Running
As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.Collection: Mother
I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.Collection: Fear
Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.Collection: Character
Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.Collection: Lying
You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.Collection: Queens
It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.Collection: War
There's a slope down toward evil, a gentle gradient that can be ignored at each step, unfelt. It's not until you look back, see the distant heights where you once lived, that you understand your journey.Collection: Journey
Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.Collection: Memories
Some truths should perhaps be left unsaid. Some doors unopened. An angel once told me to let go of the ills I held too close, to let go of the flaws that shaped me.Collection: Letting Go
Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.Collection: Sacrifice
Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.Collection: Dark
For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I'd not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide.Collection: Children
There's a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it's a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don't want to know are best at.Collection: Clever
I may be running out of options, but running out isn't an option.Collection: Running
You got responsibilities when you’re a leader. You got a responsibility not to kill too many of your men. Or who’re you going to lead?Collection: Responsibility
A man can reach into anything and turn it to his cause. It's not want, or desire, just certainty. Only be assured that whatever you reach into will reach into you in turn.Collection: Men
Men think if they're getting laid, everything is fine. Women think if they feel good, everything is fine. Neither turns out to be a very good indicator.Collection: Thinking
I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.Collection: Views
And when pain bites, men bargain. Boys too. We twist and turn, we plead and beg, we offer our tormentors what he wants so that the hurting will stop. And when there is no torturer to placate, no hooded man with hot irons and tongs, just a burn you can't escape, we bargain with God, or ourselves, depending on the size of our egos.Collection: Hurt
I like mountains, always have done. Big obstinate bits of rock sticking up where they're not wanted and getting in folk's way. Great. Climbing them is a different matter altogether though. I hate that.Collection: Hate
In the end it seems we're just toys,easy to break and hard to mendCollection: Toys
We can't be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.Collection: Wall
Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live.Collection: Pain
There's a purity to the struggle to reach a peak. You leave your world behind and take only what you need. For a creature like me there is nothing closer to redemption.Collection: Struggle
The biggest lies we save for ourselves.Collection: Lying
A strange thing — nails will hold a building together, but there's nothing better for taking a man apart.Collection: Men
Running ain't no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.Collection: Running
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull.Collection: Memories
There’s something brittle in me that will break before it bends.Collection: Break
Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use itCollection: Coward
It never pays to walk blindly. Especially not in your own castle where familiarity hides so much - even when we have the eyes to see.Collection: Eye
Hate will keep you alive where love failsCollection: Hate
You soon learn there’s no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.Collection: Kitchen
I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man's heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freelyCollection: Heart
I've always seen 'no' as a challenge rather than an answer.Collection: Challenges