Diana Gabaldon Quotes

In a great many stories that deal with time travel, there's usually somebody who knows how time travel works. They lay out the rules.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

In cartoons, in movies, time passes differently. There are flashbacks and flashfowards.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Unlike some of the time-travel movies I love, like 'Primer' or '12 Monkeys,' 'Looper' is not about time travel. It's about this situation that time travel creates and the people dealing with that situation. So narratively, the big challenge was to have time travel get out of the way.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

I suppose I'm pulled towards fiction because I really like the freedom it gives me.

If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?

Film is a great tool to play with time, going back and forth through time, or speeding time up and slowing it down and do stuff like that. That's something you can't experience in real life that you can experience on film, and it takes you to a different place.

Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.

Time machine... wouldn't you like to travel through time? I would. I'd go back... mess with people. You know what I would do? I would go back to when my mom and dad were having sex, to have me. Ya'know, come in, spank my dad on the ass I'm your son from the future! Ahaha!

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

The greatest thing that you have when you're a showrunner is this opportunity to create worlds.

If you're creating a whole universe, even if it's a universe squeezed into a solar system, you have to use a little bit of sleight of hand.

I've actually never played a time traveler, for all the time travelling movies I've done.

I like to take fictitious characters and circumstances and wedge them into a real world.

As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

When you're given the assignment to write, for example, 'Spider-Man,' the concept, characters and environment are all laid out for you. Everything is pre-established, and your sole responsibility as a creator is to craft an exciting, entertaining, hopefully original adventure, to add layers and colors to a canon that already exists.

As a writer of fiction, you don't ever want to limit the characters you create to the life you've lived. That's insanity to me.