Diana Gabaldon Quotes

I am not bothered with whether my characters are conventional or not. Because I am not in this for the designer labels and the autographs.

I don't make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that 'Pi' was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn't have to do huge scale.

I was a little concerned that a lot of people thought I wrote Merchant Ivory movies. I also thought if I was ever going to write something strange and difficult, that was the time.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint.

To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise.

I never started writing because I wanted to write myself stuff. It was really more that I had these stories to tell, and I wanted to work with people that I respected and liked.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

I started writing little short stories and poems as soon as I learned to read and write. I think I was six years old. And then when I got to be eleven, twelve, and into my teens, I was just listening to records all the time, and I got a guitar. I started to take guitar lessons when I was twelve.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.