Diana Gabaldon Quotes

When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.

I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.

History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.

I have a rule: I will not alter the basic history of a real-life character to suit our fictional needs in a big way.

Historical fiction is simply fiction set in the past, and should be judged as such.

I love historical fiction because there's a literal truth, and there's an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.

When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting, we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

It's still funny for me to think of myself as someone who writes historical fiction because it seems like a really fusty, musty term, and yet it clearly applies.

I like reading history, and actually most authors enjoy the research part because it is, after all, easier than writing.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

I think any period in history can be adapted into interesting fiction, as long as you approach the actual history with respect.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.

I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.