A man who fights for coin is loyal only to his purse.
I never finished any of my early stories. They were all beginnings, an endless number of beginnings.
I had these cheap alien toys and I made up stories for them. They were space pirates. They didn’t have names so I made up names. These were the first stories I wrote. Even as a little kid I was thinking about torture.
It was a story called ‘The Hero’ which I sold to Galaxy magazine in 1970, for $94.
It’s being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.
I could have written a story about a well-adjusted family. Ned Stark comes down to King’s Landing and takes over and solves all their problems. Would that have been as exciting?
Reading. That was the sport I was good at.
Names are hard. I have a library of What to Name Your Baby books, and I’m always picking up new books, and books of baby names from other countries. I like cool-sounding names.
Wizards die the same as other men, once you cut their heads off.
If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it’s a superficial experience isn’t it?
The world is full of cravens who pretended to be heroes.
Faith is like porridge. Better with milk and honey.
Jaime smiled knowingly. Men will read all sorts of things into a knowing smile if you let them.
She had killed him with a whisper, and she would kill two more before she was through. I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought. And that night, there was one less name to hate.
She went to the window seat and sat there, sniffling, hating them all, and herself most of all. It was all her fault, everything bad that had happened.
You’ll find truth in your looking glass, not on the tongues of men.
But what a man can do and what a man will do are two different things, he knew.
I thought my song was beginning that day, but it was almost done.
Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you.
The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.