What could he have done, one man against so many?" He could have tried, Brienne thought.

There’s part of me that loves words. But sometimes it feels like you’re trying to drive nails with your shoe.

A lot of fantasy names are too much. They’re too difficult to pronounce. I wanted the flavour of medieval England. I took actual names we still use today, like ‘Robert’, and in some case I tweaked them a little bit. I made ‘Edward’ into ‘Eddard’. If you look back at medieval times, no one knew how to spell their own names. There are a lot of variations that we’ve lost.

The singers make much of kings who die valiantly in battle, but your life is worth more than a song.

There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.

I prefer to work with grey characters rather than black and white.

I've always taken that as my guiding principle and the rest is just set dressing. You can have dragons in it, or aliens and starships, or a western about a gunslinger, or even literary fiction, and ultimately you're still writing about the human heart in conflict with itself.