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.
George R. R. MartinLife is very full of sex, or should be. As much as I admire Tolkien - and I do, he was a giant of fantasy and a giant of literature, and I think he wrote a great book that will be read for many years - you do have to wonder where all those Hobbits came from, since you can't imagine Hobbits having sex, can you? Well, sex is an important part of who we are. It drives us, it motivates us, it makes us do sometimes very noble things and it makes us do sometimes incredibly stupid things. Leave it out, and you've got an incomplete world.
George R. R. MartinMuch as I admire Tolkien, I once again always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dรปm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, "Fly, you fools." What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.
George R. R. MartinFiction 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.
George R. R. Martin