George R. R. Martin Quotes

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.

Even in fiction, I feel rigorous honesty applies. It doesn't apply to facts; it applies to what I think of as not telling emotional lies, which is a funny business.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

We try to be driven by what's a good story, what's truthful, and the drama of what happens next.

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.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.

People want good stories.

My books aren't autobiographical.

Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.