Megan Chance quotes:

[I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters.]Roland Deschain from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. There's a whole world about Roland left to know. I've got questions. He'd have answers. So pour him a glass of wine.

Honestly, I really didn't want to take on World War II France, but when I came across the story of a nineteen-year-old Belgian woman who created an escape route out of Nazi-Occupied France, I was hooked.

I know I'm not normal in this, but [ Severus ] Snape is absolutely my favorite character in the Harry Potter books. He is completely mortal - good, bad, strong, weak, motivated by hatred, motivated by love. A gorgeous, compelling, complex character who definitely earns a spot at my table.

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

Coming up with the idea is the worst part of writing for me.

I had read a lot of books on World War II, but I didn't know that downed airmen had hiked over the frozen peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains in shoes that didn't fit, in clothes that weren't warm enough, with German and Spanish patrols searching for them.

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

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

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.

Historical tends to be my bailiwick.

I love the idea of ordinary women making extraordinary sacrifices.

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

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.

It seems all spirits need theatrics, eh? Even Christ himself requires incense and holy water. We're a skeptical people. We need convincing.

Sight is one of the most easily deceived senses. I could make a coin disappear and your eyes would believe it gone, even if it were merely up my sleeve.

Trying to justify a world we don't hold all the answers to is what bedevils the best of us. Sometimes it's better just to accept that things are as we see them.

The material world is simply an expression of the mind; that's what so many fail to see. We're so dependent on what is before us that we discount our intuition. Yet if one dismisses instinct, how can one understand or believe in a world that exists beyond one's sight?

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

[ 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.

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

Andrée De Jongh story led me to other stories of women who joined the Resistance in France. I found literally dozens of memoirs written by women who had become spies and couriers and helped to create the escape network. These women were like action-star heroes.

I absolute adore epic journeys that require a protagonist to fight for every victory in the hopes of finding triumph.

I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters. Let's see. First on my list is Sam Gamgee from The Lord of The Rings. Sam is a beautiful character; in him, we find the profound heroism of an ordinary person. He epitomizes the saying that courage isn't not being afraid, courage is going anyway. I just love that.

I am one of those authors who believes (perhaps foolishly) that she is in complete control of the story.

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.

I know that sounds ineffective and daunting, but it [throw hundreds of pages away] is actually my favorite part of the writing process.

I love what I call "re-imagining," where I throw everything up in the air and let it fall in a different way. It's not the most efficient way to write a book, but it's how I find the story.

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

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

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.

I simply couldn't walk away from [ The Nightingale].

I think The Nightingale is my best, most mature, most moving novel, but maybe that's just because I love these characters. I love the setting.

I'd extend an invitation to Lisbeth Salander. She would definitely shake the party up and get it started. I think she is hands down one of the most original, innovative, kickass female fictional characters ever.

Impatient men are generous ones. Or haven't you learned that by now?

In doing the research, I found myself consumed by a single, overwhelming question, as relevant today as it was seventy years ago: When would I, as a wife and mother, risk my life - and more importantly, my child's life - to save a stranger? That question is at the very heart of The Nightingale. I hope that everyone who reads the novel will ask themselves the question.

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.

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.

My next guest [ for party with five favorite fictional characters] would be Scarlett from Gone With The Wind. I mean, come on, I have to know if she ever got Rhett back.

Of course, there are hundreds of novels and authors that have influenced me. But to choose three, they are: Stephen King/The Stand (and really most of his books); Anne Rice/The Witching Hour; and Pat Conroy/The Prince of Tides. These authors write my favorite kind of book - epic feel, gorgeous prose, unique characters, and a pace that keeps you turning the pages. From them, I learned a lot about characterization, pacing, prose, voice, and originality.

Sometimes a story grabs hold of you and won't let go.

The woman who led [downed airmen] was named Andrée De Jongh and her story - one of heroism and peril and astounding courage - became the inspiration for my novel.

Thematically, we're both [with Kristin Hannah ] interested in women's experiences and women's stories, and until now, you've mostly dealt with how it feels to be a wife/mother/sister/name your poison in today's world. But this story [The Nightingale ] is told from the perspective of two sisters during the German occupation of France in WWII.

There were others, women with stories that were told in a quieter voice: women who hid Jewish children in their homes, putting themselves directly in harm's way to save others. Too many of them paid a terrible, unimaginable price for their heroism. And like so many women in wartime, they were largely forgotten after the war's end.There were no parades for them, very few medals, and almost no mention in the history books.

To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.

With The Nightingale, I had been kicking the idea around for years. I was frightened to write it because on the surface it seems so different for me.

The women of the French Resistance astounded me. Isabelle and Vianne [from The Nightingale] are my homage to those brave and forgotten women.