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

Martin: "When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel."

Martin: "In my imagination, I can come up with anything that I want. I can make things very large and very colorful."

Martin: "I was always intensely Romantic, even when I was too young to understand what that meant. But Romanticism has its dark side, as any Romantic soon discovers... which is where the melancholy comes in, I suppose. I don't know if this is a matter of artistic influences so much as it is of temperament. But there's always been something in a twilight that moves me, and a sunset speaks to me in a way that no sunrise ever has."

Martin: "I have always been a dark writer."

Martin: "Sometimes I do ask myself why I am who I am. There are aspects of me that don't make any sense even to me... None of the kids I grew up read. Why did I always have my nose in a book? It almost seems like I was a changeling. Is it genetic? Is it something in the raising? What makes a writer? I don't know. Why are some people great basketball players or baseball players? I certainly had no talent for that."

Martin: "The cable makers are the ones who are willing to take risks and do something original and push the envelope some."

Martin: "Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder."

Martin: "I had a couple of friends, but I was mostly the kid with his nose in a book."

Martin: "Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it's going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don't know if they're going to live or die."

Martin: "Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it."

Martin: "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."

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

Martin: "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."

Martin: "One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything."

Martin: "Whenever I switch from one character to another, there's always a few days where I really struggle because I'm changing voices and I'm changing ways of looking at the world. I'm not just flicking a switch; it's harder process than that."

Martin: "I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract."

Martin: "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."

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

Martin: "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."

Martin: "I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings."

Martin: "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."