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" Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series. "

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" 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

Bad

Book

Good

" 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

Look

Tried

" 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? "

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" I think in television and film, it's not usually the child's point of view. It's the story of an adult. If there's a child in a drama or an action-adventure movie, they're someone who needs to be saved, someone who needs to be protected, or if they're killed, someone who needs to be avenged. Their character doesn't matter much. "

" 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. "

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

" In my 10 years that I spent out in TV and film, I had my shares of frustrations and annoyances and disappointments, but also I think it was, in the long run, it was very good for me in a whole bunch of ways. "

George R. R. Martin

Run

Long

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Alive

Ideas

" 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. "

" The cable makers are the ones who are willing to take risks and do something original and push the envelope some. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I've never been a fast writer. "

" 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

End

Believe

" 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. "

" 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'. "

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