GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

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.'

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

I worked out of Hollywood for 10 years and I had my heart broken half a dozen times, so I know all the things that can go wrong.

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.

Whenever I switch from one character to another, there's always a few days where I really struggle because I'm changing voices and I'm changing ways of looking at the world. I'm not just flicking a switch; it's harder process than that.

You want people to be eager for your book; the downside is when the people forget the series even exists.

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.

I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy.

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.

I like grey characters; fantasy for too long has been focused on very stereotypical heroes and villains.

Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.

I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.

I think in television and film, it's not usually the child's point of view. It's the story of an adult. If there's a child in a drama or an action-adventure movie, they're someone who needs to be saved, someone who needs to be protected, or if they're killed, someone who needs to be avenged. Their character doesn't matter much.

As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen.

I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.

Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'

Unfortunately in television, for whatever reason, fantasy became thought of as a kids' genre.

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.

I'm one of those writers who say, 'I've enjoy having written.'

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

I don't know if I have any particular views about women in positions of power, though I do think it's more difficult for women, particularly in a Medieval setting. They have the additional problem that they're a woman and people don't want them in a position of power in an essentially patriarchal society.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.