Diana Gabaldon

Eight was about the age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn't just spring out of the library shelves. ”

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. ”

There are lines of geomagnetic force running through the Earth's crust, and most of the time, these run in opposing directions - forward and backward. In some places, they deviate and will cross each other, and when that happens, you kind of get a geomagnetic mess going in all different directions. I call these vertices. ”

The Internet has improved a lot in the last few years, but still, you wouldn't want to depend on Web sources for historical analysis. There's just something hard to beat about a book. ”

I began writing 'Outlander' in 1988, so the Internet as we now know it didn't exist. ”

Every time I'd read about the stone circles, it would describe how they worked as an astronomical observance. For example, some of the circles are oriented so that at the winter solstice, the sun will strike a standing stone. ”

If nobody needs me - and usually, these days, they don't - I'll fall asleep until around midnight. Then I go upstairs and work until 4 A.M., and that's when I go back to bed for good. It suits me. ”

One of the great perks of being a writer is that you can work when you're mentally capable of it, not when someone else thinks you should. ”

Partly because of the way I write - I don't work with an outline or in a straight line. I work where I can see things happening, and so I get lots and lots of little bits to start with, and I'm doing the research at the same time. ”

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line. ”