D. B. Weiss

A lot of people go in and have to create their own characters, and they do fine with it.

I still think reading something like 'Ulysses' takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.

I was in Kenya when I read 'Catch-22,' and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya - whenever I think of 'Catch-22,' I think of Nairobi.

There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.

There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.

I would never try to invalidate someone's opinion of something or the feelings something makes them feel.

Being away from home for six months of the year and seeing your kids grow up on Skype all that time - I think I saw Molly walk for the first time on Skype. That's not good.

We've learned a lot about how information needs to flow effectively amongst a group of people. They need to be fed information, and it needs to be on this constant conveyor belt.

To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

We do have pictures on the wall, in our office in Belfast where we spend half our time. All the head shots are on the wall. So yeah, we just throw darts at the ones we don't want anymore.

Jason Momoa became a really good friend of ours when he played Khal Drogo. We loved hanging out with Momoa, and suddenly we couldn't bring him to Belfast anymore.

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.

'Confederate,' in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It's a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.

We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.

I was reading scripts, doing coverage, for CAA. Reading hundreds and hundreds of scripts across the board, from blind submissions to 'Brokeback Mountain'. It was not always a pleasant task but something, in hindsight, I'm glad I did.

I don't know how people do this job collaboratively if they don't really get along. You're spending all day every day for months and years on end with somebody.

Would I have watched another season of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. Would I have watched another two seasons of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. The fact that I would easily have watched much, much more than I got made the ending so much more poignant and stronger and better for me.

Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.

Writing can be a very isolating profession. By its very nature, you spend a lot of your time barricaded in your house or office, typing on your own.

I remember when my first child was born, and I had a script that was due, and I asked the guy I was writing it for, a guy who I'm now friends with but at the time was not friend with, 'Can I have some extra time? I had a kid born.' He's like, 'No, we need it now.'

We ended up realizing that's not an economical way to create creatures, putting people in green leotards and figuring it out later. You can maybe do that if you're making 'Avatar,' but we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.

One of the trickiest things about 'Game of Thrones' is just seeding those first couple of episodes with that basic information that people need to know, both about the world and the ground rules of the world, and the relationships between the characters, as far as who means what to whom and why.

I think that everything starts to go to hell when you start smelling your own farts and complimenting yourself on how great they smell. We're not going to turn into fart-smellers.

After you do this for a while, you get used to things not working the way you want them to. There's a job you want, and you don't get it. There's a movie you'd like to get made, and it doesn't get made. You become inured to it.