Quotes from Gillian Flynn

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

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

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.

The newspaper industry was built on the penny dreadfuls.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it.

I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.

I watched 'Psycho' a million times.

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.'

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

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

Don't be discouraged - every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.