Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings. "

George R. R. Martin

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

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

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. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" My characters who come back from death are worse for wear. In some ways, they're not even the same characters anymore. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they've lost something. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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? "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" Whenever I switch from one character to another, there's always a few days where I really struggle because I'm changing voices and I'm changing ways of looking at the world. I'm not just flicking a switch; it's harder process than that. "

George R. R. Martin