The man is a monster. The worst I have ever seen, in fact, since I last looked in the mirror. The truth? I am rotting too. I am buried alive, and already rotting. If I...

On the battlefield there are no rules.

I spent half my childhood in the shadows. Hiding from my father or my brother. Creeping from a place of solitude to another. Seeing while unseen, and pretending I was a part of what I...

You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain’t long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.

The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up...

All your life spent getting ready for the next thing. I climbed a lot of hills now. I crossed a lot of rivers. Crossed the sea even, left everything I knew and came to Styria....

I just think TV is becoming more and more interesting in a way. Films are more and more derivative, you know, whether it’s ‘Transformers 2’ or ‘Shrek 5’, or it’s yet another iteration of another...

What’s the difference? Fill a hundred pits with dead Northmen, congratulations, have a parade! Kill one man in the same uniform as you? A crime. A murder. Worse than despicable. Are we not all men?...

I used to love to hear stories of that man’s exploits! One of my heroes, when I was young. Riding round the enemy, harassing his lines of communication, falling on the baggage train and whatnot.”The...

Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.

Hurray’, shouted Glokta. ‘Porridge again!’He looked over at the motionless Practical. ‘Porridge and honey, better than money, everything’s funny, with porridge and honey!

Luck is a woman. She’s drawn to those that least deserve her.

A man can forgive all manner of faults in beautiful women that in ugly men he find entirely beyond sufferance

Sometimes when I’m really enjoying a book, I’ll read a sentence or paragraph and just think – how can someone’s head be wired in such a way that they’d come up with that?

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways,...

Inquisitor Lorsen’s thin lip curled. “There is truly nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the...

There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Lorsen shook his head in amazement. ‘You truly are disgusting.”I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who...

The best steel doesn’t always shine the brightest.

That’s what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with...

Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same...

Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do…

My name is Nicomo Cosca, famed solider of fortune, and I am here for dinner.

Those with the least always lose the most in war.

West couldn’t simply leave the man like this, he didn’t have it in him.”Goodman Heath,” he said as he approached, and the peasant looked up at him, surprised. He fumbled for his hat and made...

It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.

One day you’re something, so promising and full o’ dares, so big the world’s too small a place to hold you. Then, ‘fore you know it, you’re old, and you realise all them things you...

The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.

Power is a bloody mirage. The closer you seem to get the further away it is

Names turned over by time, like the plough turning the soil. Bringing up the new while the old were buried in the mud.

I’m a fucking coward.””Maybe.” Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun’s corpse. “There’s a hero. Tell me who’s better off.

Things aren’t what they used to be’ is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and...

That’s optimists. You bastards never learn.

When you’re in hell, only a devil can point the way out.

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and...

I’ve made peace with myself.Good for you. That’s the hardest war of all to win.Didn’t say I won. Just stopped fighting.

This is stupid.””Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and...

Sometimes it doesn’t matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.

Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person.

You have to be grateful for the small things, when any minute might be your last.

He is dead and I, the self serving coward that I am, still live. Life is not fair. There is no pattern. People die at random. Something everyone knows, but no one truly believes. They...

The Inquisitor waited for silence. “Do you believe in anything?””Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.

Me atrevería a decir que un hechicero puede llegar a ser útil y demás, pero, o sea, ,siempre tienen que actuar de una manera tan puñeteramente rara?

So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You’re a hero.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don’t get bogged down in it.

A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success.

Have a smile for breakfast, you’ll be shitting joy by lunch.