Top 822 Quotes & Sayings by George R. R. Martin - Page 14

You look pale, Sansa," Cersei observed. "Is your red flower still blooming?" "Yes" "How apt. The men will bleed out there, and you in here.

You mistake patience for forbearance.

I've been very lucky. There were times when I was afraid I would never sell another book, but I never doubted I'd write another book.

Even the sky was grey. Grey and grey and greyer. The whole world grey, everywhere you look, everything grey except the eyes of the bride. The eyes of the bride were brown. Big and brown and full of fear.

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.

When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east," she said sadly. "When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When my womb quickens again, and I bear a living child. Then you will return, my sun-and-stars, and not before." -Daenerys Targaryen

The intelligent and efficient politician is a species virtually unknown in the galaxy. Perhaps I might secure a scraping [for my] cell library.

When you have known the kiss of a flaying knife, a laugh loses all its power to hurt you.

The women are the strong ones, truly.

The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer’s farce is almost done. My son is home.

It was a story called ‘The Hero’ which I sold to Galaxy magazine in 1970, for $94.

It's very hard to find a good child actor. There are a lot of child actors out there, especially in America, and they're cute kids, but most child actors appear on sitcoms where their main role is to be cute and make funny little remarks.

You know, I've always considered women to be people.

You can't just pick people for their hair color or the shape of their face. You have to go with the best actors.

He raised his eyes. "Sister. See. This time I knew you." Asha's heart skipped a beat. "Theon?" His lips skinned back in what might have been a grin. Half his teeth were gone, and half those still left him were broken and splintered. "Theon," he repeated. "My name is Theon. You have to know your name.

I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.

I know nothing and perhaps I never will.

She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.

I always give my students exercises where they really have to open a vein and bleed all over the paper and that's the way you get the important characters. Sooner or later every writer worth reading writes a story his mother wouldn't read and having to get that stuff out is part of one's growth as a writer.

Dragons old and young, true and false, bright and dark. And you. A small man with a big shadow, snarling in the midst of all.

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.

And any man who must say 'I am king' is no true king at all.

What are gods for if not to sit in judgment over men? The Many-Faced God does not weigh men's souls, however. He gives his gift to the best of men as he gives it to the worst. Elsewise the good would live forever.

And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

There are a lot of people out there who will write books, in which everything turns out nicely and the bad guys lose, the good guys win, the boy gets the girl and they live happily ever after. There's a million books like that and if that's the comfort you're looking for, you should read those books and not my books because that's not the kind of book that I am interested in.

I had written three books [Games of Throne], at that point, and each one of them was better than the other. At a certain point, as the books were doing well, I started getting interest from Hollywood, from various producers and studios who were initially interested in doing a feature film. I met with some of those people and I had phone conversations with some of those people, but I didn't see it being done as a feature film.

The strongest trees are rooted in the dark places of the earth. Darkness will be your cloak, your shield, your mother's milk. Darkness will make you strong.

There are worse ways to die than warm and drunk.

...Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh, yes.

Power resides where men believe it to reside.

I thought my song was beginning that day, but it was almost done.

He pushed away from her and raised his arm, forcing his stump into her face. "A Hand without a hand? A bad jape, sister. Don't ask me to rule.

A bear! A bear! All black and brown and covered in hair!

Men's lives have meaning, not their deaths.

Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.

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'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.

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.

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 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 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.