Happy Birthday George R. R. Martin!

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

Eine Königin muss allen ihr Ohr schenken. Jenen von hoher Geburt und denen von niedriger, den Starken und den Schwachen, den Edlen und den Eigennützigen. Eine Stimme spricht vielleicht falsch, in vielen zusammen findet man dagegen immer die Wahrheit.

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

Die größten Narren sind oftmals klüger als die Männer, die über sie lachen.

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.

Kronen stellen seltsame Dinge mit den Köpfen darunter an.

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

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

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?

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

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.

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

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.

Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Yes - 90% of fantasy is crap. And so is 90% of science fiction and 90% of mystery fiction and 90% of literary fiction.