Gillian Flynn
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
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
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
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
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
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
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
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
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
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
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
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
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
Gillian Flynn

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

Gillian Flynn
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
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.