Every once in a very long while, Lord Tywin Lannister would actually threaten to smile; he never did, but the threat alone was terrible to behold.
What’s dead may never die.
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.
The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.
The prejudice is still there, but it’s breaking down. You have writers like Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He’s a writer who’s determined to break down genre barriers. He’s done amazing things.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I’ve written for Hollywood.
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.
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.
Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature. – Lyanna.
The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.
Jay wondered how they’d feel the morning they all woke up and realized that somehow Camelot had turned into Mordor.
Politicians were mostly people who’d had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.
I’ve never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they’re only men with the useful bits cut off.
She just laughed in his face and told him she’d sooner crawl in a bed with his father’s leeches before she’d crawl in one with him. She stopped laughing when he put his knife in her.
Of course you know him. Everyone knows a pear-shaped man.
You mistake patience for forbearance.
He had found over the years that silence sometimes yielded more than questions. And so it was this time.