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

I have to admit that WWII France was not at all on my radar for Kristin Hannah.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

All life's a risk, that's what makes it interesting.

It felt like an oversight to me, something that needed to be corrected. They [women who hid Jewish children] deserved to be understood and remembered.

[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.

I read a ton of fiction - historical, contemporary, literary, commercial, I love it all.