George R. R. Martin Quotes

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

Writing novels is so much more satisfying than writing television.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

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

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.