The High Septon once told me that as we sin, so do we suffer.

There are no happy endings.

I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?

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

For the night is dark and full of terrors.

I always give my students exercises where they really have to open a vein and bleed all over the paper and that's the way you get the important characters. Sooner or later every writer worth reading writes a story his mother wouldn't read and having to get that stuff out is part of one's growth as a writer.

I've lost a hand, a father, a son, a sister, and a lover, and soon enough I will lose a brother. And yet they keep telling me House Lannister won this war.