Quotes from George R. R. Martin

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.

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.

The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.

When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.

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

He had found over the years that silence sometimes yielded more than questions. And so it was this time.

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.

His time was past, her handmaid Irri declared. No man should live longer than his teeth.

...spend my time warring and whoring, that's what I was made for.

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.

Love is madness, and lust is poison.

Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.

'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy.

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.

I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.

I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.

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.

On the gallows tree, all men are brothers.

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

If ice can burn, then love and hate can mate.

Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

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.

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.