Gillian Flynn Quotes

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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 cheap.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

I was very lucky to grow up in a household that really valued storytelling and didn't find it frivolous.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

I love 'Fatal Attraction.'

- Gillian Flynn

I can't think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

I was a quirky kid. I think that's the kind way of putting it.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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 experiences to it.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.

- Gillian Flynn

My interest is in turning over a rock and seeing what's underneath. It's a personality trait more than anything; it's what made me want to become a crime reporter, even though I was not suited for it personality-wise.

- Gillian Flynn

My first job had me miscast as a bubbly shopgirl; I was pathologically shy and, thus, tended to replace human speech with excessive head gestures. It was like being waited on by Harpo Marx.

- Gillian Flynn

I do love 'The Turn of the Screw' - I just think that one's always so disturbing.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

'Rosemary's Baby' is one of my all-time favorite books. I love that it just ends with, you know, 'Hey, the devil's in the world, and guess what? Mom kind of likes him!' And that's the end.

- Gillian Flynn

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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 transparent about what you want.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

Very quickly, I discovered I did not have what it takes to be a good crime reporter: I was too unassertive and a little bit wimpy. It was very clear that was not what I was going to do, but I loved journalism, and I'm the daughter of a film professor, and my mom taught reading.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

There's nothing that can drive me from zero to crazy faster than a man who comes up to me and says, 'You know, I don't normally read books by women, but I really liked 'Gone Girl.''

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

I read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good.

- Gillian Flynn

I was not always someone who wanted to get married or thought I would get married, so being a true writer, I was always navel-gazing: 'What are good marriages? What are bad marriages?'

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, 'I'm OK, no worries!'

- Gillian Flynn

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.'

- Gillian Flynn

I'm a true-crime addict. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but I can't stop.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

Kansas City is truly an awesome town.

- Gillian Flynn

The midwest is great because it hasn't been entirely claimed. There's more room to write about it; it's harder to write about New York, because even if you've never been there, you think you know what it's like. To do it in any sort of fresh way is trickier.

- Gillian Flynn

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

The newspaper industry was built on the penny dreadfuls.

- Gillian Flynn

I do spend - I feel like I spend about my first 20 minutes at any cocktail party convincing people that I'm not going to harm them in some way.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

The funny thing, I guess, is that my husband ended up being the muse of a book about the worst marriage in the world, because if he hadn't consistently said, 'Don't censor yourself, don't worry about me' - if he'd been anxious and worried about it - then it would never have gotten written.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

I think women are very ambidextrous. We don't think twice about reading a book or a movie starring guys. But for guys, it's, like, 'Oh my God, that's a woman thing.' So with my son, I very carefully portion out the female heroes and characters to make sure he's getting an equal amount.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

Ever since I was a child, I've been a huge comic and graphic novel fan, but I've never tried writing one before.

- Gillian Flynn

I would love to do a full-scale graphic novel.

- Gillian Flynn

Because I'm a woman writing about women who do bad things, that's somehow very 'other.' When men write that, it's called a novel. It's just a book.

- Gillian Flynn

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 do, that's a very perverse thing.

- Gillian Flynn

My dad was a film professor, so he would take me to wildly inappropriate movies.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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.'

- Gillian Flynn

I love the way the Victorians found a way to put faces in everything: you know, furniture and marble and, you know, everywhere you turn around - the banister, you know, there's someone looking at you.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

I was very interested in what happens to the husband when his wife goes missing, and how quickly they can be turned into heroes and villains.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

I want books to give me insight into the way people's brains work and hearts work, and that's what engages me.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

I'm probably a guy's girl, although I hate that phrase. I tend to have more close male friends than I do female friends, and I always have. I would say that of my 10 close friends, seven are men.

- Gillian Flynn

It seems like the darker the books are, the nicer the person is. People say it's the romance writers you've got to watch out for.

- Gillian Flynn

Libraries are filled with stories on generations of brutal men, trapped in a cycle of aggression. I wanted to write about the violence of women.

- Gillian Flynn

I watched 'Psycho' a million times.

- Gillian Flynn

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?

- Gillian Flynn

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.'

- Gillian Flynn

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!'

- Gillian Flynn

There are so many good books, I don't want to only read within one particular type.

- Gillian Flynn

I have two kids, and anyone who has a kid in order to feel loved is going to be in trouble because kids are first and foremost all about themselves. They'll say they love you, but 10 seconds later they'll turn on you.

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

I tend to write about dark things that happen in a very domestic setting 'cause that, to me, is much scarier than the unknown.

- Gillian Flynn

I'm not hyper-opinionated, but when I do have an opinion, I'm very stubborn, and I want to persuade everyone to my point of view.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

Books and movies are kind of my two great loves. I don't have too many other actual hobbies. That's pretty much it.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

I had been laid off from 'Entertainment Weekly 'right before I started writing 'Gone Girl.'

- Gillian Flynn

What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations, not necessarily for a hero's journey. It's to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.

- Gillian Flynn

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

- Gillian Flynn

Some of the most disturbing, sick relationships I've witnessed are between long-time friends, and especially mothers and daughters.

- Gillian Flynn

I love video games.

- Gillian Flynn

I love a good worst-case scenario. My brain just kind of works that way. I like that idea of how much a person can get away with, and why.

- Gillian Flynn

A really great popcorn movie is extremely hard to pull off. A really great popcorn book is equally hard to pull off, so I don't feel guilty devouring one.

- Gillian Flynn

The first time my mom read my very first book, she was like, 'I'm not gonna belabor this. It's not a big deal. But I have to ask the question: Is everything okay?'

- Gillian Flynn

There are no really new stories anymore.

- Gillian Flynn

I was always someone who wanted to write. I was a real shy, bookworm-ish kid, and I think my earliest stuff was fairly dark.

- Gillian Flynn

I don't think I'm naturally a good person. I think some people have an innate goodness to them, and I am sort of proud of the fact that I kind of keep myself in check, probably because I have awesome parents.

- Gillian Flynn

One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'

- Gillian Flynn

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.

- Gillian Flynn

To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.

- Gillian Flynn

You have to be pretty selfless to have a child, who doesn't give a lot back to you.

- Gillian Flynn

I've never been interested in watching or reading anything because it's the hero's story. I don't feel the need to be inspired by the character or learn a lesson. I feel the need to be engaged by them.

- Gillian Flynn

In marriage, it's best to keep perspective. Get out of your head and get some perspective.

- Gillian Flynn

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

- Gillian Flynn

It's important to tell stories, and it's a worthwhile thing to do.

- Gillian Flynn

I spent a lot of - too much of - my childhood watching movies and thinking about movies.

- Gillian Flynn