Gillian Flynn

“I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.”

“Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?”

“That's always been part of my goal - to show the dark side of women. Men write about bad men all the time, and they're called antiheroes.”

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”

“My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.”

“...and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, 'That was fine'. And your life is a long line of fine.”

“Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.”

“It is always consoling to think of suicide; it's what gets one through many a bad night.”

“I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people—people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin—that they’d be bored as hell by me. It’s a lonely way to go through life.”

“I mostly go under the radar, which is fantastic because I would not be a good famous person.”

“Female violence is a specific brand of ferocity. It's invasive. A girlfight is all teeth and hair, spit and nails - a much more fearsome thing to watch than two dudes clobbering each other.”

“My first two novels featured narrators who were aggressively unattached: They couldn't form any sort of genuine relationship. So I had thoroughly explored the geography of loneliness and isolation.”

“People focus on the darker female characters in my books, but for every one of those, I can also show you an equally screwed up man that no one ever comments about, or a nicer woman that no one comments about. I don't feel like that's my specialty.”

“I've always had a fondness for the Gothic. That's what kind of stories attract me: Why do people do bad things?”

“I am a great believer in jobs for teens. They teach important life lessons, build character, and inflict just the right amount of humiliation necessary for future success in the working world.”

“I always loved ghost stories and haunted house stories, whether they were done in a fantasy way or done in a realistic way.”

“I like westerns, fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, thrillers, and I try to avoid the word 'genre' altogether. A good book is a good book.”

“For me, suspense is always harder and better than going for the quick, outright scare.”

“I've wondered if 'Harry Potter' would have been as big if it was 'Harriet Potter.' Now that I've written a screenplay - and raising a son in particular - I'm looking at story content and realizing how limited women are onscreen.”

“I find, the older I get, the more surprised I am about how hesitant people are to say what they really want, what they really dream about, what really drives them. It's as if sometimes we're sort of embarrassed, as we get older, to be transparent about that. But you save so much time if you're trans...”

“Even good characters have their dark sides, and I think it is important that women aren't seen as innately good.”

“I am not someone who has hobbies. I have tried knitting, and I can't figure it out.”

“I think women do have that fatal streak to them that's partly because it's been romanticized, the martyr complex - 'Look what you did to me!'”

“There's nothing lovelier than having a newborn and still plotting a dark conspiracy.”

“The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?”

“No one watches 'Taxi Driver' and says, 'Oh, it's a male-oriented film.' No one looks at nine-tenths of the films out there that are headlined by men and say, 'It's a male-oriented film.'”

“I'm not much of a procedural person. That's not what I'm interested in.”

“I watched 'Psycho' a million times.”

“I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.”

“I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.”

“Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.”

“As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.”

“I was not a nice little girl. My favorite summertime hobby was stunning ants and feeding them to spiders.”

“The skill set that lets you be alone in your pyjamas for two years writing a book is not the same skill set that lets you go on television shows like 'The View' or 'Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.'”

“One of my rules about writing exercises is you never are allowed to put them in your book because it's just too tempting. You try to shoehorn things that don't belong.”

“I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.”

“We're into this barrage of pop culture - you know, TV, movies, the Internet. We become creatures that we've made up, made of certain different flotsam from pop culture and certain different personas that are in style.”

“You don't normally see incredibly ugly people who've gone missing and it becomes a sensation.”

“A great thriller, to me, is more about creating a sense of unease: a queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right.”

“I think that women really entwine with the people that they become close to in a way that men don't - and so, when they are forced to disentwine, you can't remove the vines without doing some damage.”

“Women are just as violently minded as men are, but with men, it's taken for granted.”

“I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this ... I still love scribbling the word - WRITER - any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer ....”

“The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover...”

“I always loved scary movies, and my dad was a film professor.”

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who...”

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers...”

“I get really tense during the first draft. Really tense. That's not great for my family, because the first draft usually takes about a year.”

“I've always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. I was in fifth grade or something and very proud of being in the adult fiction aisles. I tore through 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles.'”

“There's a book by Anne Rivers Siddons called 'The House Next Door' that I just think is one of the all-time great haunted-house stories. I think that's one of the all-time greatest.”

“Writing has certainly helped me explore about 20,000 versions of my authentic self. I suppose that's what most writers discover if they write long enough: there are a lot of selves roaming around in there.”

“As a kid in the eighties, I didn't need much disposable income. I went to Catholic school - white shirt, plaid skirt - so fashion choices were limited. But youth finds a way. For me and my schoolmates, neon argyle socks were a crucial barometer of coolness. Hair ribbons, too, and they didn't come ch...”

“I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.”

“I love Robin Wright's character in 'House of Cards' because she's a bona fide villain. She's a not-nice person in a believable way; you can see her working in the world.”

“Women shouldn't be expected to only play nurturing, kind caretakers.”

“I like the idea that people who see 'Gone Girl' are possibly going to come out with incredibly different reactions to it - not just between men and women, but if you are in a good relationship or a bad relationship. Everyone is going to bring their own bundle of prejudices and viewpoints and experie...”

“In college, I discovered the Joyce Carol Oates short story 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' which is definitely one of the most incredibly unnerving, frightening short stories ever written.”

“I love Joyce Carol Oates. I love Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle. Arthur Phillips is always consistent.”

“The best crime reporters don't mind charging in - but they also know how to do it as decent human beings.”

“I just think - the Midwest, if you grow up there, you're deathly afraid of putting on airs. Any time a Midwesterner criticizes someone, it's usually involving some form of being too big for your britches.”

“I assumed that 'Gone Girl' would do incrementally better than 'Dark Places,' and that would be great. So the fact that it did more than that was kind of an incredibly pleasant surprise.”

“I think it's a very female trait to want to please men and to want to be considered the Cool Girl. And if you take that to the farthest reach, where you're actually selling yourself out and degrading yourself by doing things you don't actually want to do, only in order for this man to think that you...”

“My favorite game was one I invented with my cousins called Mean Aunt Rosie, where I was a deranged maiden aunt who chased them around the house.”