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

George R. R. Martin

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" 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

" 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

" It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it. "

George R. R. Martin

" I do get invitations all of the time to play actual fantasy football, by the way, but I get the feeling that I'd like it too much. I have enough demands on my time. My fans would kill me. "

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

" 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

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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'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

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

George R. R. Martin

" The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy. "

George R. R. Martin

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

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

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

Black And White

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

George R. R. Martin

" If I was a soldier going to war, I'd be pretty scared the night before a battle. It's a scary thing. And I want my readers to feel that fear as they turn the page. "

George R. R. Martin

" I've never been a fast writer. "

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

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga. "

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

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

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

" Don't write outlines; I hate outlines. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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.' "

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 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. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin