Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If you're stirred by the words below, read on for more inspiring author quotes.

This week in history -- on September 20, 1948 -- George R. R. Martin was born. Sixty-three years later, he'd be listed on Time magazine as one of the most influential people in 2011, and have enough Hugo Awards to fill a castle to its moat.

Now, when he's not buying drinks for locals in small-town pubs, or passing up cameo opportunities in the hit HBO series "A Game of Thrones" to work on The Winds of Winter, or making perfect sense about a number of issues, George R.R. Martin is writing. He has been since he was young. He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he could be found selling his monster stories to fellow elementary school classmates. His input matched his voracious output, with influences ranging from historical novels to "The Twilight Zone" to Dylan Thomas.

And yet somehow, following the renewed success of his Song of Ice and Fire series thanks to HBO's adaptation, he's absurdly begun to earn the reputation for not writing enough. Or, more accurately, fast enough. Fans have criticized the writer for the great gaps in between his epic novels (the standout being the time between A Feast for Crows in 2005 and the followup A Dance with Dragons in 2011), some even lamenting he'll die before another book gets written. Martin has responded appropriately.

The truth, of course, is when he isn't writing his novels he's busy writing something else. Give the man a break. In an alternate universe where entitled fans are written into their favorite author's storylines, they'd be the first to go and in the most gruesome of ways. It's no secret that everyone eagerly awaits the release of The Winds of Winter, so to bide your time, start reveling in the author's witty media retorts or his character's crisp one-liners full of verve and venom. (Or just brush up on your Dothraki.) Below are just a handful of quotes to get you started.

1. "A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge." (George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones)

2. "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one." (George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons)

3. "In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which." (Interview with Infinity Plus, February 2001)

4. "Art is not a democracy. People don't get to vote on how it ends." (Interview with GamePro magazine, 8 April 2003)

5. "There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like and where all the closets are going to be, where the plumbing is going to run, and everything is figured out on the blueprints before they actually begin any work whatsoever. And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they've planted — whether it's an oak or an elm, or a horror story or a science fiction story, but they don't know how big it's going to be, or what shape it's going to take. I am much more a gardener than an architect." (Audio Interview with Geekson in Episode 54, 4 August 2006)

6. "Ten years from now, no one is going to care how quickly the books came out. The only thing that will matter, the only thing anyone will remember, is how good they were. That's my main concern, and always will be." (Official blog, July 2007)

7. "My reading of history has shown me that simply 'being a good man' is not enough. That there are many kings who are good men and yet bad kings. And even good kings sometimes make disasterous decisions. So government is complex, politics is complex." (On a panel with R. Scott Bakker in Semana Negra, Spain, 2008)

8. "Tolkien made the wrong choice when he brought Gandalf back. Screw Gandalf. He had a great death and the characters should have had to go on without him." (On a panel at Odyssey Con 2008, April 2008)

9. "Men have scars, women mysteries." (A Feast for Crows)