Even good characters have their dark sides, and I think it is important that women aren't seen as innately good.
— Gillian Flynn
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 grew up in a house full of books.
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.
I'm not much of a procedural person. That's not what I'm interested in.
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.
Women shouldn't be expected to only play nurturing, kind caretakers.
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 was a quirky kid. I think that's the kind way of putting it.
My dad was a film professor, so he would take me to wildly inappropriate movies.
Women are just as violently minded as men are, but with men, it's taken for granted.
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.'
I watched 'Psycho' a million times.
Some of the most disturbing, sick relationships I've witnessed are between long-time friends, and especially mothers and daughters.
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 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 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.
I always loved ghost stories and haunted house stories, whether they were done in a fantasy way or done in a realistic way.
I find, the older I get, the more surprised I am about how hesitant people are to say what they really want, what they really dream about, what really drives them. It's as if sometimes we're sort of embarrassed, as we get older, to be transparent about that. But you save so much time if you're transparent about what you want.
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.
I love video games.
You don't normally see incredibly ugly people who've gone missing and it becomes a sensation.
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.
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 read all kinds of novels, as long as they're good.
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.
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?'
The newspaper industry was built on the penny dreadfuls.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I always loved scary movies, and my dad was a film professor.
I love a good worst-case scenario. My brain just kind of works that way. I like that idea of how much a person can get away with, and why.
My interest is in turning over a rock and seeing what's underneath. It's a personality trait more than anything; it's what made me want to become a crime reporter, even though I was not suited for it personality-wise.
I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.
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.
As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.
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.
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.
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.
Kansas City is truly an awesome town.
I tend to write about dark things that happen in a very domestic setting 'cause that, to me, is much scarier than the unknown.
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.''
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.
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.
I was not a nice little girl. My favorite summertime hobby was stunning ants and feeding them to spiders.
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.
There's nothing lovelier than having a newborn and still plotting a dark conspiracy.
