Diana Gabaldon Quotes

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

When I read books, I actually really love imagining whomever I want to in the character's role. I get such vivid pictures on my own that that is a big part of the experience for me.

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'

When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing.

The act of reading a story is sacred, and people build images and all that stuff.

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

I feel like the books were just written like a movie. You read it and you can just kind of see everything. Before I went in to read with the director, I read the first book and I loved it. I didn't realize how good the writing was. And then I went in and read with Gary Ross, and that was it.

As I read, I start to form clear ideas of the characters and allow myself to be a proper conduit for this author's voice so that you will feel you have been on a seductive audio journey.

There are times my stories become - what I feel - not only accessible to hearing me on television, but they make wonderful reading.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.

When I was a kid, I was always going to bed creating a story, and that was the birth of filmmaking for me. I would like going to the dream-state by telling the story to someone else in my mind. That was my imaginary friend; it was an imaginary audience listening to my story.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.

I very seldom, very seldom, even know what my characters look like.