Quotes from 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.'

To spend a life in dreams, that sounded too lovely.

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

I love 'Fatal Attraction.'

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 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.

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 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.

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

I had no sympathy for drama queens.

Ah, well, being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to be a shallow person.

You drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, that was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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