Diana Gabaldon Quotes

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl's 'James and the Giant Peach'.

I reread 'Nicholas and Alexandra' in my early twenties, and I never forgot the story.

It'd be impossible to capture the feel of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' in a novel starring Mace Windu; 'All Quiet' is a tragic coming-of-age story.

As I kid, I read the 'Little House on the Prairie' series and was sad when I got to the last book.

I studied Wilfred Owen for my English A Level, and that led me to Sassoon and Blunden, Rosenberg and Thomas.

All Quiet on the Western Front.

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

Often, when people ask me what I read as a young girl, I lie. Or, I should say, I lie by omission. I tell them about my brilliant fourth-grade teacher, Miss Artis, who assigned us 'Johnny Tremain' and 'Where the Red Fern Grows' and 'Tuck Everlasting,' all books that made an impression on me. And people nod in approval.

I am now working on the second WWI story and find the challenge marvelous.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

I read 'Animal Farm' when I was 11, and it remained my favorite book, really.

I would come, many years later, to understand why 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is considered 'an important novel', but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.

'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.

I read 'Jaws' and 'The Godfather' back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be.

The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.

When I was in my 20s in the 1970s, I read all of Jean Rhys. I have reread very little since because the first impressions were so powerful they have stayed with me.

When I was about 12 or 13, my father gave me 'The Little Prince.' He was making sure that I knew it was a special book. I'd seen the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but to me it seemed a very French name, and I was not excited about him as a person.

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

When I was growing up, there actually wasn't a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the '60s and '70s, older than me.

One day at my grandmother's house, I discovered 'The Secret Garden' and read it. This was the first book I found entirely for myself, and I cherished it.

The first book that they gave me was Jeannie, a young teenager. I went on with her maybe ten books.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.