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" I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

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

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

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

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

George R. R. Martin

" I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy. "

George R. R. Martin

" I grew up with four T.V. channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You gotta wait a week for the next one. I'd mail-order books: take a quarter, get an envelope, send off for it and wait until it arrived. I grew up waiting for things. "

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

" Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories. "

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

" 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? "

George R. R. Martin

" You want people to be eager for your book; the downside is when the people forget the series even exists. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

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

" 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

" I suppose I'm a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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.' "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

Black And White

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build. "

George R. R. Martin

" All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful. "

George R. R. Martin

" Whether you're a history buff or a fantasy fan, Druon's epic will keep you turning pages. This was the original game of thrones. If you like 'A Song of Ice and Fire', you will love 'The Accursed Kings'. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" I watch NFL football on Sundays. I enjoy gaming with friends, meaning role-playing games; I still enjoy going to conventions and traveling. "

George R. R. Martin