...Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh, yes.

There was an agelessness about him, a stillness; on Roose Bolton's face, rage and joy looked much the same.

The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

They hate you because you act like you're better than they are

Reading. That was the sport I was good at.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy. But, I wanted to put a somewhat different spin on it. The whole trope of absolute good versus absolute evil, which was wonderful in the hands of J.R. Tolkien, became cliche and rote in the hands of the many Tolkien imitators that followed.