- On emotions in Fiction: “Fiction… should feel as if you’re living these things when you read or watch them. If you’re so distanced by it that a character dies and you don’t care, then to an extent the author has failed.”
- On visiting bookstores: “To go in and wander from stack to stack, take down some books, read a little, leave with a big stack of things I’d never heard of when I came in.”
- On favourite scene he has written: Speech that a septon [the Westerosi version of a priest] gives to Brienne about broken men and how they become broken.
