George R. R. Martin Quotes

Make no mistake, dwarf. I fought for you, but I do not love you'' ''It was your blade I needed'' Tyrion said, ''not your love.

When the red star bleeds and the darkness gathers, Azor Ahai shall be born again amidst smoke and salt to wake dragons out of stone.

You make us look bad', complained Toad. 'You looked bad before I ever met you', Jon told him.

Pyp had stabbed a turnip with his knife. "The night is dark and full of turnips," he announced in a solemn voice. "Let us all pray for venison, my children, with some onions and a bit of tasty gravy.

They were never my pack, not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little girl, and no wolf at all.

I know nothing and perhaps I never will.

Perhaps that is the secret. It is not what we do, so much as why we do it.

Tears, she said scornfully to Sansa as the woman was led from the hall. The woman's weapon, my lady mother used to call them. The man's weapon is a sword. And that tells us all you need to know, doesn't it?

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.

They are children, Sansa thought. They are silly little girls, even Elinor. They’ve never seen a battle, they’ve never seen a man die, they know nothing. Their dreams were full of songs and stories, the way hers had been before Joffrey cut her fathers head off. Sansa pitied them. Sansa envied them.

In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?

An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [...] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.

Too stupid to learn and too stupid to give up.

In this world, only winter is certain

What would a Frey know of honor? - Sir Davos Seaworth

I will teach them what it means to put a lion in a cage, Cersei thought.

When you have known the kiss of a flaying knife, a laugh loses all its power to hurt you.

Contempt, thought Tyrion, the universal tongue.

Knights die in battle,” Catelyn reminded her. Brienne looked at her with those blue and beautiful eyes. “As ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.

The sun will soon be setting, and corpses make poor company by night. These were dark and dangerous men, alive. I doubt that death will have improved them.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

Can they love without a word for it?

Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love.

Believe it or not, I worked four summers in college as a sports writer covering baseball for a parks and rec department in Bayonne, N.J.

There are worse ways to die than warm and drunk.

Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm, or the gods, or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.

Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.

In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

"Another name? Oh, certainly. And when the Faceless Men come to kill me, I'll say, 'No, you have the wrong man, I'm a different dwarf with a hideous facial scar.'" Both Lannisters laughed at the absurdity of it all.

She should be on a hill somewhere, under a fruit tree, with the sun and clouds above her and the rain to wash her clean.

Remember, whatever the price...I'll beat it! I like living! Tyrion Lannister

And what lesson can we draw from Volantene history? If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.

Why should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints - the ground's too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do.

You wear your honor like a suit of armor... You think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make it hard for you to move.

Sacrifice is never easy or it is no true sacrifice. - Stannis

That was the way of this cold world, where men fished the sea and dug in the ground and died, whilst women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood and pain.

It's a fool boy who mocks a giant, and a mad world when a cripple has to defend him.

Swift as a deer. Quiet as a shadow. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Quick as a snake. Calm as still water.

Men see what they expect to see.

Gods and wonders always appear, to attend the birth of kings.

I was a novelist first. But in the mid 80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, you know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.

Man wants to be the king o' the rabbits, he best wear a pair o' floppy ears.

No mortal man could frighten him, no more than the darkness could, nor the bones of his soul, the grey and grisly bones of his soul.

Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.

From where I sit, battles are hard. I’ve written my share. Sometimes I employ the private’s viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That’s vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general’s point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.

Some doors are best left closed.

I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.