Do dead man dream? The dead themselves are silent on the matter

For herself, she wanted sleet and ice, howling winds, thunder to shake the very stones of the Red Keep. She wanted a storm to match her rage.

Minds are like swords, I do fear. The old ones go to rust.

Fear cuts deeper than swords.

This is not Winterfell', he told him as he cut his meat with fork and dagger. 'On the Wall, a man gets only what he earns. You're no ranger, Jon, only a green boy with the smell of summer still on you.

A great many of the epic fantasies, from The Lord of the Rings onward, are about war, but to my mind, a lot of it doesn't really deal honestly with the consequences of war, what war does to us, as a society, what war does to us, as individuals, and the struggle for power, in the same way, and what we're fighting for.

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.