Diana Gabaldon

Where I live, there is a group of fans who take me out to tea every year to pick my brains about what's coming up.

You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

When' Voyager', the third book of the series, hit the 'New York Times' bestseller list, they very honorably redesigned the covers and started calling them fiction.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

I was writing 'Outlander' for practise and didn't want anyone to know I was doing it. So I couldn't very well announce to my husband that I was quitting my job and abandoning him with three small children to visit Scotland to do research for a novel that I hadn't told him I was writing.

We started watching 'Doctor Who' as a family because our first daughter was a cranky baby, and she would get up during the night - and it was her dad's job to stay up because I worked at night.

I've never seen anyone deal in a literary way with what it takes to stay married for more than 50 years, and that seemed like a worthy goal.

When I am at home writing, I have all the power. I am God. But TV is a polytheistic universe.

While you certainly will recognize 'Outlander' if you've been reading the books, there's also this wonderful sense of novelty and discovery about it because of all the little new touches and twists. I watch it in utter fascination waiting to see what will happen.

I'm not a team player. I'm used to having total control over everything I do.