GRRM on What He Tries to do with POV Characters (Spoilers Extended)

Background

While originally hoping to only use his initial set of 8 POVs, the story quickly bloated to GRRM using 24 total POVs (not including the Prologue/Epilogue) although he (as of 2024) says he has no plans to add more and that we should "take our bets" on which ones are going to die in TWoW. In this post I wanted to focus on some quotes by GRRM on what he tries to do with his POV characters.

If interested: Death of a POV: There is always another POV Character Around

When writing a POV, GRRM really tries to get inside who that character is:

On writing his POVs, he uses their motivations and desires. What do they want? What do they want to achieve? What drives them? What SHOULD they do? Ethics, morals, ambitions, etc... all part of the mix. -SSM, Torcon: 28 August 2003

and show how we are all the hero of our own story:

GRRM: When I'm writing in the viewpoint of one of these characters, I'm really inside their skin. So, you trying to see the world through their eyes to understand why they do the things they do. And we all have, even characters who are thought of to be bad guys, who are bad guys, in some objective sense, don't think of themselves as bad guys.
That's a comic book kind of thing, where the Red Skull gets up in the morning [and asks] "What evil can I do today?" Real people don't think that way. We all think we're heroes, we all think we're good guys. We have our rationalizations when we do bad things. "Well, I had no choice," or "It's the best of several bad alternatives," or "No it was actually good because God told me so," or "I had to do it for my family." We all have rationalizations for why we do shitty things or selfish things or cruel things. So when I'm writing from the viewpoint of one of my characters who has done these things, I try to have that in my head.
And I do, so there's an empathy there that makes me love even people like Victarion Greyjoy, who is basically a dullard and a brute. But, he feels aggrieved and sees the world a certain way. And Jaime Lannister and Theon Greyjoy, they all have their own viewpoints. I love them all. Some I love more than others, I guess.
That's one thing I love about your writing, you capture this internal monologue that people have, where they talk themselves into believing a fixed narrative.

but due changes in his story structure, etc. that has led to some shorter story arcs (ex: Arys Oakheart and Quentyn Martell) having rather short arcs (Arys = 1 (originally 2: if interested: "Eternal Shame": Thoughts on an Abandoned Plotline in Dorne) and Quentyn with 4, and likely the original mega prologue characters as well):

Question: do you choose characters because they will provide you with a viewpoint or something characterful?

GRRM: Actually, no. I try to give each viewpoint character an arc of his own, and ideally I would like to think that you could pull the material out – in the early books I was able to pull out the Daenerys chapters and publish them separately as a novella, and I won a Hugo Award for that. It'd be great if I could pull out each [character-arc] and it would resemble a story. In some cases a character died and that was a very short story. My prologue and epilogue characters always die but even then I try to give them a story. -SSM, Redwood City Signing Interview with Dan Jones - "An Evening with GRRM": 8 Sept 2011

TLDR: Just some quotes from GRRM about what he tries to do with a POV character.