George R.R. Martin Quotes

Quotes by and about George R.R. Martin

(Continued from his main entry on the site.)

Martin: "I've always made up stories."

Martin: "I remember these things that I make up better than I remember real people or events. I remember some obscure character who appeared three novels ago in one paragraph, but I don't remember someone I met yesterday."

Martin: "The brain neurons that other people use to deal with real life - in my brain [they] are wired differently."

Martin: "I've always felt that character is the front of fiction. If you make the characters real, then the rest of the furniture around them is almost incidental. ... For me, character is really what fiction is all about."

Martin: "Some writers thrive on [pressure]. I don't really. I don't like deadlines. I've spent most of my career trying to avoid deadlines."

Martin: "Sometimes I do ask myself why I am who I am. There are aspects of me that don't make any sense even to me. I came out of a blue-collar environment in Bayonne. Not a literary environment by any means. My mother read a few books, bestsellers and things like that. My father never read a book after he got out of high school, I'm sure. None of the kids I grew up read. Why did I always have my nose in a book? It almost seems like I was a changeling. Is it genetic? Is it something in the raising? What makes a writer? I don't know. Why are some people great basketball players or baseball players? I certainly had no talent for that."

Martin: "One of the things I've come to really appreciate is a kind of unpredictability in my fiction. There's nothing that bores me quicker than a book that just seems, I know exactly where this book is going. You've read them, too. You open a new book and you read the first chapter, maybe the first two chapters, and you don't even have to read the rest of it. You can see exactly where it's going. I think I got some of that when I was growing up and we were watching TV. My mother would always predict where the plots were going, whether it was I Love Lucy or something like that. 'Well, this is going to happen,' she would say. And, sure enough, it would happen! And nothing was more delightful, when something different happened, when it suddenly took a twist. As long as the twist was justified. You can't just arbitrarily throw in twists and turns that make no sense. Things have to follow. You want the thing in the end where you say, 'Oh my God, I didn't see that coming, but there was foreshadowing; there was a hint of it here, there was a hint of it there. I should have seen it coming.' And that, to me, is very satisfying. I look for that in the fiction that I read and I try to put it into my own fiction."