"Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin is many things -- writer, beard-haver, producer, etc. -- but there's one thing he's not.

He's not Justin Bieber. And, according to a talk he gave yesterday (November 4) at Northwestern University, he's glad of that fact. Martin, who attended Northwestern for both undergraduate and masters degrees, said that he's grateful for his fame coming later in life. He said that if his success had come when he was younger, he might not have coped well.

"It's made me have a certain sympathy for the teenage assholes that are running around out there, the Justin Biebers and the Lindsay Lohans — no wonder these people are crazy!" he said.

"If this stuff had happened to me — if I had written a novel when I was at Northwestern when I was 19 years old and it had sold billions of copies, I wouldn't have been able to handle that at 19," he added. "I can barely handle it at 67. It's surreal."