People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.

I see the emphasis on a lot of ideas and I know that's directed at me. [Megan Chance] come up with an idea, hone it, and write it. I come up with thirty ideas, flesh each one out, research each one, come up with characters, and then decide I don't like it.

In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie.

The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.

I love women being the heroes of the piece. There is just something so dramatic and important about this story [The Nightingale ].

I do not often follow my characters off on tangents or change my story on a whim. I have an outline which I follow quite sternly...for a good long while. Then it turns out in some way to be insurmountably wrong and I am forced to re-think every component. Usually at this point I throw hundreds of pages away.

In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.