Quotes from Diana Gabaldon

Any piece of good music is in essence a love song.

She sounded as though love were an unfortunate but unavoidable condition.

I've had no fewer than three young women on separate occasions come up to me at book signings and unzip their pants, turn around, and drop them to show me that they had 'Bonnie lassie' tattooed across their rumpuses!

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.

You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I willna let ye go

Do ye want me?" he whispered. "Sassenach, will ye take me - and risk the man that I am, for the sake of the man ye knew?

Oh, womanly sympathy, love AND food?" I said, laughing. "Don't want a lot, do you?

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.

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.

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.

One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.

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.

Whenever you're dealing with something that's difficult to describe, that you can't get across to someone in a sound bite, it sounds like the normal default is to pick what's easiest, and in the case of fiction written by women, fiction involving women, fiction involving any sort of relationship, the word that comes to mind is 'romance.'

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. He can't do it either, but men always try.

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.

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.

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.

For so many years, for so long, I have been so many things, so many different men. But here," he said, so softly I could barely hear him, "here in the dark, with you… I have no name.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

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.

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.

You are safe," he said firmly. "You have my name and my family, my clan, and if necessary, the protection of my body as well. The man willna lay hands on ye again, while I live.

Man's sense of Morality tends to decrease as his Power increases

Am I a man? To want you so badly that nothing else matters? To see you, and know I would sacrifice honor or family or life itself to lie wi' you, even though ye'd left me?