Melvyn Bragg Quotes

I'm a sponge when it comes to stories. I'd say everything influences me in some way, but for 'Red Queen' in particular, I was really affected by the 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series by George R. R. Martin.

If you squint at 'Deadwood,' you can see 'Game of Thrones' coming. That's the show that first got me thinking 'Carnival Row' could be a series.

Doc Savage, Indiana Jones, Flash Gordon... these were the kinds of characters I was thinking about as I was developing Jonas Quantum because there aren't that many brand new characters being introduced anymore.

'Game of Thrones' is the broadest of narratives. I don't know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what's on the show.

We've been given this great gift, this huge canvas of these beautiful books by George Martin, and the idea of telling this whole epic through to the end is incredibly compelling.

This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it.

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.

'Avatar: The Last Airbender' creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have, along with their team, painstakingly planned out the Avatarverse.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

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

I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.

Taking place in some Nordic-looking hinterland where all the seasons are out of whack, 'Game of Thrones' is the most aggressive example since 'Battlestar Galactica' of a genre that's perceived as adolescent aspiring to be fully adult.

I suppose I'm most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

I enjoy worldbuilding very much. I generally start with an approximation. With 'Flesh and Spirit' and 'Breath and Bone,' because I was thinking of a world on the brink of a dark age, I began with the sense of Roman Britain. But I purposely set the geography to match something other than Britain - which has been overdone.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

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

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

In the 'Dreamblood' books, I'm focusing more on what I like about epic fantasy: the layering and depth of tension; the chance to really delve into the minutia of an alternate society and its politics; a large cast of characters to love and hate.

It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.

There have been discussions of doing 'The Demon Cycle' on both large and small screen scale, and while there is no project currently in development, I think the series has both the big imagery and complex character development to have legs either as a TV series or film franchise.

I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

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.

Tolkien was quite a religious man, and so is George R.R. Martin. They kind of have this epic quality about them when they write the material.