George R. R. Martin Quotations | Page 4

A great many of the epic fantasies, from The Lord of the Rings onward, are about war, but to my mind, a lot of it doesn't really deal honestly with the consequences of war, what war does to us, as a society, what war does to us, as individuals, and the struggle for power, in the same way, and what we're fighting for.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy. But, I wanted to put a somewhat different spin on it. The whole trope of absolute good versus absolute evil, which was wonderful in the hands of J.R. Tolkien, became cliche and rote in the hands of the many Tolkien imitators that followed.

Most people were startled to find out there were books that preceded Game Of Thrones. I'm a case of working forty years to be an overnight success.

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.

I know who's going to be on the throne [in the Gameof Thrones], at the end, so I better not say. But, there will be a few people sitting on it, before the end.

I'm fond of all my characters so every time one doesn't make the cut I'm a little disappointed although I understand it.

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.

Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation.

We're all the heroes of our own stories. So, when I am inside the head of a character who would otherwise be considered a villain, I have a great deal of affection for that character and I'm trying to see the world and the events through their eyes.