I grew up in Flagstaff, and I still own my old family house up there, so I go up there a couple of times a month just to sit for a day or two and work without any kind of interruption, and I usually take a dinner break, and I'll watch two hours of DVD.

At one point, some years ago, a nice gentleman had it in mind to do 'Outlander The Musical.'

I took to saying, 'Look, tell you what: Pick it up; open it anywhere. Read three pages. If you can put it down again, I'll pay you a dollar. So I never lost any money on that bet, but I sold a lot of books.

My mother taught me to read in part by reading me Walt Disney comics, and I never stopped.

My husband asked me once why I read so many mysteries, and part of it is just intellectual, part of it is the joy of any good book, but part of it is the moral stakes there.

I hated 'The Lovely Bones'. I thought her vision of Heaven was amazingly uninspired and very depressing. The book was just tedious.

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.

Orkney has the kind of landscape that sort of lends itself to a relationship with the people. I think that relationship is intensified because of its remoteness and the long periods of time when there was no interaction with other cultures.

If you're going to write time travel stories, you have to sort of figure out how does time travel work in this particular universe that I'm dealing with.

There are always people screeching and upset that I did this or didn't do that. Basically, they're upset that I didn't rewrite an earlier book they particularly liked.

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.

My husband gets up at around 5.30 A.M., so I'll tuck him in around 9.30 P.M. or 10 P.M., and then I'll go and lie down on the couch with a book and my two dachshunds.

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.

I discovered that, given the indescribable nature of what I write, the only way to sell it is to give people free samples.

If you want to know anything about me, read my books - it's all there.

Some time later, long after 'Voyager' was published, I came across the Dunbonnet in another reference, and it gave an expanded version, and it told me the Dunbonnet's name - which was James Fraser.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

If you donate to a charity and save a few kids, 20 years down the line, there will be more people who exist because of you. In other words, you should consider your actions fully.

I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.

I thought at first that I might write mysteries, but then I said, 'Mysteries have plots, and I'm not sure I can do that yet.'

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

I do recall loving 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' and I know I read it in a schoolroom, but I think I was in the sixth grade at the time, so it probably wasn't assigned reading.

I don't think I ever consciously separated 'school' books from any others; I just read anything that came across my path.

I've read a lot of classic literature from assorted cultures, and always glad to read more when one comes across my path - but why be embarrassed by the fact that flesh and blood has limits? Nobody's read everything.

Oh, 'Pandaemonium', by Chris Brookmyre! Just fabulous - such a layered, beautifully structured, engaging, intelligent book. I love all Chris's stuff, but this was remarkable.

I cannot remember not being able to read.

I think it's extremely important that children are exposed to reading.

My mom would keep all kinds of materials in her classroom for children for reading. She kept comic books, newspapers, sports magazines, and books of all kinds.

You are at some point exposed to a wonderful story, and you really want to know what happens next, so you learn to read in order to find out.

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.

When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.

I happened to see a really old 'Doctor Who', the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, and he'd picked up a Scotsman from 1745. It was an 18 or 19-year-old man who appeared in a kilt, and I thought, 'That's rather fetching.'

I think characters are going to be, if not a reflection of the author, at least some refraction of some part of their personality.

Each book develops a strong organic shape. And when that shape is complete, the book is complete. I don't know where the end is. I don't start at the beginning. It's like playing Tetris in my head in a very slow kind of way. All the shapes join up.

People have been trying to make a two-hour feature film of 'Outlander' for years and years and years.

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.

I understand what it is that actors do. They embody someone that they aren't.

I'm a really slow writer. What I need to start writing on any given day, is a kernel, a line of dialogue, anything I can sense concretely.

When you're an artist, you can't write with the intent of affecting anyone.

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.

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

If you're writing something that's clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it's perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you're writing an essentially straight historical fiction.

Actors act... Their job is to become this character. And I have, in fact, seen Sam Heughan become Jamie and Caitriona Balfe become Claire right before my eyes. It was an astonishing transformation.

I've never been willing to commit to more than one at a time, because I just don't know - I don't plan the books out ahead of time. So I have no idea how much ground we'll cover.

All I had when I began writing the first book was rather vague images conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt, so essentially I began with Jamie, although I had no idea what his name was at the time.

The media is always looking for a story of one kind or another.

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.

I read some books, and I thought, 'This is better than sliced bread!' and a month later, I couldn't remember thinking about it. And I've read others that were kind of a slog, and I've put them down and come back six months later thinking, 'Wow, this is great.' So, you know, things change all the time.

I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.