Top 77 Gillian Flynn Quotes

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.

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.

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!’

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.

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

What I tell myself is that there is never going to be another ‘Gone Girl’ for me. I mean, I really believe that. I think I’ll write other good books; I have faith in that.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.’

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I do love ‘The Turn of the Screw’ – I just think that one’s always so disturbing.

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.

There are no really new stories anymore.

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.

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.

I think everyone self-mythologizes.

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.

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

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.”

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

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?

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 love video games.

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

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 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?’

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’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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.