40 quotes
Of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the crudest is the one called love.
Meathouse Man (1976)
Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.
The real difference, to my mind, is between romantic fiction, which all these genres are a part of, and mimetic fiction, or naturalistic fiction.
Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends.
This is a night for song and sin and drink, for come the morrow, the virtuous and the vile burn together.
Fire & Blood (2018)
What boy does not wish to find secret powers hidden in himself?
A Clash of Kings (1998)
When a pirate grows rich enough, they make him a prince.
A Clash of Kings (1999)
In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.
infinity plus interview (2001)
There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners.
I think that for science fiction, fantasy, and even horror to some extent, the differences are skin-deep.
Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his doubt whispered. Grown men know better.
A Clash of Kings (1998)
I am much more a gardener than an architect.
Believe me, no one wants to finish this book more than me.
Progress update on A Dance with Dragons via his website (2008)
Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?
Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be.
— How can a man be brave when he's afraid ?
— It is the only time a man can be brave.
For a moment the forest seemed a deep green sea, storm-tossed and heaving, eternal and unknowable.
"Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?"
"That is the only time a man can be brave."
Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one.
A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five (2011)