Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Whenever anything bubbles up, I have to put it down. I have bits and pieces all over my hard drive. "
Diana Gabaldon
Hard
Drive
Down
Related Quotes:
" All of my books have an internal geometric shape, and once I've seen the shape, then the writing gets much faster and easier because I now do know where we're going, and I know what's motivating these people, why they were here, and therefore, I have some good idea how they got there, and so I can fill in the missing chunks somewhat more easily. "
Diana Gabaldon
Know
Good
I Can
" A romance is a courtship story. In the 19th century, the definition of the romance genre was an escape from daily life that included adventure and love and battle. But in the 20th century, that term changed, and now it's deemed only a love story, specifically a courtship story. "
Diana Gabaldon
Life
Daily Life
Adventure
" I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line. "
Diana Gabaldon
Beginning
Plan
Work
" Back in the day, when I was a university professor, I used to teach a class in Human Anatomy and Physiology. This class was popular with the football players, who all took it under the tragic misapprehension that it would be easy. "
Diana Gabaldon
Class
Day
Teach
" Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction. "
Diana Gabaldon
Historical
About
Fiction
" I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually. "
Diana Gabaldon
Enough
True
New York
" Well, I can't remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three. "
Diana Gabaldon
Well
Able
Age
" I hated 'The Lovely Bones'. I thought her vision of Heaven was amazingly uninspired and very depressing. The book was just tedious. "
Diana Gabaldon
Book
Heaven
Thought
" I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence. "
Diana Gabaldon
Night
Me
Late
" What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos. "
Diana Gabaldon
Chaos
Science
Patterns
" I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading. "
Diana Gabaldon
Work
Long
You
" People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different. "
Diana Gabaldon
Science
Writing
Cold
" Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades. "
Diana Gabaldon
Character
Conflict
Good
" When you're reading, you're not where you are; you're in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere. "
Diana Gabaldon
You
Reading
I Can
" The thought that you ought not to drink while pregnant came much, much later. In fact, I had my first child in 1982, and I was still told by nurses and so forth, 'Have a glass of wine with dinner. It'll help you relax.' "
Diana Gabaldon
Child
You
Relax
" If you donate to a charity and save a few kids, 20 years down the line, there will be more people who exist because of you. In other words, you should consider your actions fully. "
Diana Gabaldon
Words
Charity
Line
" From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press. "
Diana Gabaldon
Late
Done
Early
" If you're going to have more than one person read your book, they're going to have totally different opinions and responses. No person - no two people - read the same book. "
Diana Gabaldon
People
Two
You
" If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction. "
Diana Gabaldon
Writing
You
History
" I have all the time and space in the world when I write a book. "
Diana Gabaldon
World
Book
I Write
" Every time I'd read about the stone circles, it would describe how they worked as an astronomical observance. For example, some of the circles are oriented so that at the winter solstice, the sun will strike a standing stone. "
Diana Gabaldon
Standing
Winter
Stone
" I happened to see a really old 'Doctor Who', the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, and he'd picked up a Scotsman from 1745. It was an 18 or 19-year-old man who appeared in a kilt, and I thought, 'That's rather fetching.' "
Diana Gabaldon
Old
Old Man
See
" While you certainly will recognize 'Outlander' if you've been reading the books, there's also this wonderful sense of novelty and discovery about it because of all the little new touches and twists. I watch it in utter fascination waiting to see what will happen. "
Diana Gabaldon
Waiting
Watch
You
" In a great many stories that deal with time travel, there's usually somebody who knows how time travel works. They lay out the rules. "
Diana Gabaldon
Great
Time
Rules