Gillian Flynn Quotes

Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.

I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult.

Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.

Love makes you want to be a better man.

But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it's their kryptonite

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar.

The world will always want a drink.

I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, 'I'm OK, no worries!'

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

I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.

My brain goes very easily into the darkness.

It always has. There are people who like to see what's under the rock and people who don't, and for some reason I've always been one of those to say, 'Hey, let's flip over that rock.'

It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.

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.

People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker.

I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don't reach my lips.

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.

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day.

People who knew things about you. It's the kind of place that leaves a mark.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Women get consumed. Not surprising, considering the sheer amount of traffic a woman's body experiences. Tampons and speculums. Cocks, fingers, vibrators and more, between the legs, from behind, in the mouth.

What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart.

The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

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.

Everytime people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes.

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.

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.

Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.

Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times

To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.

I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device-the mysterious knock on the door-because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don't know what's out there, yet you know you'll open it. You'll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.

I think there is something very relatable in the idea that you hit a certain age, later in your life, where you realize you have to pick up the rug and see what's underneath it and deal with stuff.

I've always been partial to the image of liquor as lubrication, a layer of protection from all the sharp thoughts in your head.

I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.

He was one of those guys who'd pronounce I'm a hugger as he came at you, neglecting to ask if the feeling was mutual.

The question I've asked more often during our marriage, if not out loud, if not to the person who could answer. I supposed these questions storm cloud over every marriage: What are you thinking how are you feeling? Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?

To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.

I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me.

Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.

I'm all for whatever transitions the book properly to a movie.

I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.

Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

Sleep is like a cat: It only comes to you if you ignore it.

My mother had always told her kids: if you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see.

I'm not someone who can be depended one five days a week. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday? I don't even get out of bed five days in a row-I often don't remember to eat five days in a row. Reporting to a workplace, where I should need to stay for eight hours-eight big hours outside my home- was unfeasible.

Most beautiful, good things were done by women people scorn.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality. I can't help it, it's what I've always done: The way some women change fashion regularly, I change personalities. What persona feels good, what's coveted, what's au courant? I think most people do this, they just don't admit it, or else they settle on one persona because they are too lazy or stupid to pull a switch.

There are no really new stories anymore.

My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.