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" 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

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" 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

" 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. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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

" 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

" 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 have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters. "

George R. R. Martin

" I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains. "

George R. R. Martin

" 'Rome' was one of my favourite shows, and I wish HBO had given it three more seasons 'cause I would have loved to continue watching 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 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

" 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 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 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

" When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven't unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks. "

George R. R. Martin

" The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy. "

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

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

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

" Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, 'A Song of Ice and Fire', as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment. "

George R. R. Martin

" I have files, I have computer files and, you know, files on paper. But most of it is really in my head. So God help me if anything ever happens to my head! "

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

" If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy, I've always written horror stories and monster stories, right from the beginning of my career. I've always moved back and forth between the genres. I don't really recognise that there's a significant difference between them in some senses. "

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

" I worked out of Hollywood for 10 years and I had my heart broken half a dozen times, so I know all the things that can go wrong. "

George R. R. Martin

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

George R. R. Martin

" When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world. "

George R. R. Martin

" 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. "

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

" 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

" Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it. "

George R. R. Martin