Diana Gabaldon Quotes

I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.

I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually.

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

Calling one thing 'literature' and another 'fiction' is a way to create status where there is none.

I'm not at all snobby about book prizes and how they pollute the world of literature. Just like with the Olympics, a little bit of competition gets people truly engrossed in the business of literature.

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

I'm not really a mainstream novelist!

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.

There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.

It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "Science Fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

My position as the best-selling author at E! is secure - unless Salman Rushdie develops a show with them.

When I pick up a book that's, you know, wreathed in laurels, I expect a lot, and that doesn't give the book its best chance to shine.

I've liked Pete Gurney's writing always.

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

Writers have always been very underrated.

I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.

I think we worry way too much about where books should fit inside genres. In a romance, the hero and heroine are on a journey together, and no matter how awful it gets, by the end of the book they'll be in love, with the probability of a happy ending.

I came out of what we romance writers call The Romance Ghetto, because we get so little respect.

A long, negative review I wrote of Rushdie's novel 'Fury' earned me a rebuke from the writer: He told an administrator at the college where I teach, and who had invited Rushdie to come speak, that he wouldn't share the stage with me.

Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?