Quotes from Diana Gabaldon

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

I was writing 'Outlander' for practise and didn't want anyone to know I was doing it. So I couldn't very well announce to my husband that I was quitting my job and abandoning him with three small children to visit Scotland to do research for a novel that I hadn't told him I was writing.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel.

I learned just recently, in fact, that a lot of people who read do not form a visual image from what they're reading. They just don't. They follow the events and get the resonance with the language, but they have only a vague, general idea of what the characters look like.

I don't think I ever consciously separated 'school' books from any others; I just read anything that came across my path.

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.

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.

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.

One of the great perks of being a writer is that you can work when you're mentally capable of it, not when someone else thinks you should.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

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.'

Now I've got a fairly good grasp of the 18th century on what was common and what people thought. But I don't write in order. I write bits and pieces and sort of glue them.

Whenever anything bubbles up, I have to put it down. I have bits and pieces all over my hard drive.

It's worth noting that at the time of the American Revolution, no sane person would have given two cents for its success.

It's important to remember that the Jacobite Risings of the 18th century constituted a religious civil war, not a nationalistic movement.

Once you've chosen a man, don't try to change him', I wrote with more confidence. 'It can't be done. More important-don't let him try to change you.

Boldness in battle is nothing out of the way... but to face down fear in cold blood is rare in any man.

He's a man...and that's no small thing to be.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman's part to bid them to stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are-or for not coming back.

No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.

If ye loved him, he must ha' been a good man.' 'Yes, he...was.' 'Then I shall do my best to honor his spirit by serving his wife.

Men would eat horse droppings, if ye served them wi' butter.