George R. R. Martin Quotes

My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.

For me, even in my first book, the pleasures of writing anything magical is that it has to be physical. It has to be grounded and very much in this world. Then, I get to play with all the consequences of this new thing.

I think that my passion for writing fantasy began at about the same time as my passion for reading fantasy.

The real world is the fantasy writer's scrapbook. Real history, real geography, real customs and religions are all invaluable sources of guidance and inspiration.

Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.

I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.

When you talk about fantasy, the usual problem is that whilst you've got the world of imagination, there are no controlling forces.

It's hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there's all these 'rules' I'm supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

Whenever you're writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get the reader/audience/player to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things like dragons and magic. To do that, you need long threads - of history and culture.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.

Guy Gavriel Kay's 'Tigana' is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. It's beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.

When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'The Mists of Avalon.'

Fantasy enabled me to break the shackles and create a whole new level of 'the world is in danger' stakes.

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

World-building is my favorite pastime, so with me, I'm always about reining myself in. I don't want to lose too much of the mystery by hammering every detail to death. I did fiddle with lots of maps for 'Glass Sword,' as the second installment sees Mare, Cal and company traveling throughout their country, and that's always fun for me.

Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.

As with all types of writing, fantastical fiction depends on the same basic rules.

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it.

I don't look at it as writing a book in a videogame universe. I look at it as writing for 'Halo', which for me, transcends being just a great video game. It's evolving into a whole new mythology.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.