I think the look of the show is great. There was a bit of an adjustment for me. I had been living with these characters and this world since 1991, so I had close to twenty years of pictures in my head of what these characters looked like, and the banners and the castles, and of course it doesn’t look like that. But that’s fine. It does take a bit of adjustment on the writer’s part but I’m not one of these writers who go crazy and says, “I described six buttons on the jacket and you put eight buttons on the jacket, you Hollywood idiots!” I’ve seen too many writers like that when I was on the other side, in Hollywood. When you work in television or film, it is a collaborative medium, and you have to allow the other collaborators to bring their own creative impulse to it, too.

–Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, in an in-depth interview with Vanity Fair’s Jim Windolf, about the HBO show, his progress on completing the seven-book series, and working inside and outside Hollywood. Read more on Martin and Game of Thrones.