For me, suspense is always harder and better than going for the quick, outright scare.
Gillian Flynn
You don’t normally see incredibly ugly people who’ve gone missing and it becomes a sensation.
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
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
I watched ‘Psycho’ a million times.
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 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
I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, ‘I’m OK, no worries!’
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
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
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
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
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
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
Even good characters have their dark sides, and I think it is important that women aren’t seen as innately good.
Gillian Flynn
You have to be pretty selfless to have a child, who doesn’t give a lot back to you.
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
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 always loved ghost stories and haunted house stories, whether they were done in a fantasy way or done in a realistic way.
Gillian Flynn
There’s nothing lovelier than having a newborn and still plotting a dark conspiracy.
Gillian Flynn
As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.
Gillian Flynn
I am not someone who has hobbies. I have tried knitting, and I can’t figure it out.
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
The newspaper industry was built on the penny dreadfuls.
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
I can’t think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.
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
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
To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.
Gillian Flynn
I always loved scary movies, and my dad was a film professor.
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
There’s nothing lovelier than having a newborn and still plotting a dark conspiracy.
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 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
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
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 was not a nice little girl. My favorite summertime hobby was stunning ants and feeding them to spiders.
Gillian Flynn
Some of the most disturbing, sick relationships I’ve witnessed are between long-time friends, and especially mothers and daughters.
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
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
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
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
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
Women are just as violently minded as men are, but with men, it’s taken for granted.
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
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
My dad was a film professor, so he would take me to wildly inappropriate movies.
Gillian Flynn
Kansas City is truly an awesome town.
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
I was a quirky kid. I think that’s the kind way of putting it.
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