Diana Gabaldon Quotes

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Diana Gabaldon

Profession : Author

Birth : January 11, 1952

I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read 'The Hobbit' and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.

Diana Gabaldon

You see one scene shot 25 times in one day, which is totally fascinating, but while you're watching it, you're remembering, 'This is what I was thinking when I was writing that part of the book,' and so it brings it all back very gradually as you're working.

Diana Gabaldon

Partly because of the way I write - I don't work with an outline or in a straight line. I work where I can see things happening, and so I get lots and lots of little bits to start with, and I'm doing the research at the same time.

Diana Gabaldon

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

I grew up in Flagstaff, and I still own my old family house up there, so I go up there a couple of times a month just to sit for a day or two and work without any kind of interruption, and I usually take a dinner break, and I'll watch two hours of DVD.

Diana Gabaldon

I took to saying, 'Look, tell you what: Pick it up; open it anywhere. Read three pages. If you can put it down again, I'll pay you a dollar. So I never lost any money on that bet, but I sold a lot of books.

Diana Gabaldon

'Rob Roy' was a great adaptation. It was a lot better than 'Braveheart.'

Diana Gabaldon

My mother taught me to read in part by reading me Walt Disney comics, and I never stopped.

Diana Gabaldon

My husband asked me once why I read so many mysteries, and part of it is just intellectual, part of it is the joy of any good book, but part of it is the moral stakes there.

Diana Gabaldon

I hated 'The Lovely Bones'. I thought her vision of Heaven was amazingly uninspired and very depressing. The book was just tedious.

Diana Gabaldon

We started watching 'Doctor Who' as a family because our first daughter was a cranky baby, and she would get up during the night - and it was her dad's job to stay up because I worked at night.

Diana Gabaldon

Orkney has the kind of landscape that sort of lends itself to a relationship with the people. I think that relationship is intensified because of its remoteness and the long periods of time when there was no interaction with other cultures.

Diana Gabaldon

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

If you're going to write time travel stories, you have to sort of figure out how does time travel work in this particular universe that I'm dealing with.

Diana Gabaldon

There are lines of geomagnetic force running through the Earth's crust, and most of the time, these run in opposing directions - forward and backward. In some places, they deviate and will cross each other, and when that happens, you kind of get a geomagnetic mess going in all different directions. I call these vertices.

Diana Gabaldon

There are always people screeching and upset that I did this or didn't do that. Basically, they're upset that I didn't rewrite an earlier book they particularly liked.

Diana Gabaldon

If nobody needs me - and usually, these days, they don't - I'll fall asleep until around midnight. Then I go upstairs and work until 4 A.M., and that's when I go back to bed for good. It suits me.

Diana Gabaldon

My husband gets up at around 5.30 A.M., so I'll tuck him in around 9.30 P.M. or 10 P.M., and then I'll go and lie down on the couch with a book and my two dachshunds.

Diana Gabaldon

My parents were both born in 1930. They grew up during the Depression. They wanted their children to have secure lives, to have a good salary and a pension plan. If I could've guaranteed that I'd be a best-selling writer, that would've been one thing, but nobody could say that. So I knew better than to say that was ambition.

Diana Gabaldon

Eight was about the age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn't just spring out of the library shelves.

Diana Gabaldon