I am surrounded by flatterers and fools. It can drive a man to madness,.. . Half of them don’t dare tell me the truth, and the other half can’t find it.

Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?

What was it Catelyn Stark had called them, that night at Bitterbridge? The knights of summer. And now it was autumn and they were falling like leaves.

I knew that, when writing a book, you're not constrained by a budget. You're not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You're not limited to any particular running time.

A lord may love the men that he commands, but he cannot be a friend to them. One day he may need to sit in judgement on them, or send them forth to die.

Littlefinger: A trade envoy from Lys once observed to me that Lord Stannis must love his daughter very well, since he'd erected hundreds of statues of her all along the walls of Dragonstone. Tyrion: My lord, those are gargoyles.

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.