When it comes to talking about George R. R. Martin, it’s difficult to think of an author that so relentlessly puts his readership through emotional pain. In his epic series A Song of Ice and Fire
Born in New Jersey as George Raymond Richard Martin, the author is a son of a longshoreman and has roots from countries all over the globe, including the likes of Germany, England, France, Italy, and Ireland. His love for writing bloomed from an early age when he would write stories to sell to other children in his neighbourhood. After going through the education system, he took up teaching before moving on in 1970 to writing full-time.
The 20th of September marks the 67th birthday George R. R. Martin, so we decided to take a look at some of his best quotes. Let’s hope we get the next ASOIAF book before his 68th, huh?
“It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.”
I get up every day and work in the morning. I have my coffee and get to work. On good days I look up and it’s dark outside and the whole day has gone by and I don’t know where it’s gone. But there’s bad days, too. Where I struggle and sweat and a half hour creeps by and I’ve written three words. And half a day creeps by and I’ve written a sentence and a half and then I quit for the day and play computer games. You know, sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.
“Laughter is poison to fear.”
“Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.”
The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.”
“Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.”
“History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.”
My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results… but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.”
“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.”
“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”
“All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.”
I’ve always said there are – to oversimplify it – two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up. I think all writers are partly architects and partly gardeners, but they tend to one side or another, and I am definitely more of a gardener. In my Hollywood years when everything does work on outlines, I had to put on my architect’s clothes and pretend to be an architect. But my natural inclinations, the way I work, is to give my characters the head and to follow them.
“Don’t write outlines; I hate outlines.”
“I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings.”
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