A bag of dragons buys a man's silence for a while, but a well-placed quarrel buys it forever.

I wonder what the High Septon would have to say about the sanctity of oaths sworn while dead drunk, chained to a wall, with a sword pressed to your chest?

You are an honest and honorable man...Ofttimes I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.

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.

A man could not always be where he belonged, though.

And all was black and still, and black and cold, and black and dead, and black.

Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be.