Gillian Flynn Quotes

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.

Problems always start long before you really, really see them.

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

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.

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.

Nick is like a good stiff drink: He gives everything the correct perspective.

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

What a generous thing that is, I realize, for a husband to try to make his wife laugh.

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

I'm a true-crime addict. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but I can't stop.

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

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

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.

She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)

I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.

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.

My imagination is more tweaked by imagining the lives of the people who were there before us. I don't need to give myself the willies. I'm quite good at that - I can freak myself out wherever I am.

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

She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.

Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

Coffee goes great with sudden death.

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

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.

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

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 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.

It’s humbling, to become the very thing you once mocked.

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

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.

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

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.

There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

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.'

Republicans go to Sam’s Club, Democrats go to Costco.

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

There are no really new stories anymore.

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.

The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.

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.

I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.

Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.

There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.

There's no app for a bourbon buzz on a warm day in a cool, dark bar. The world will always want a drink.

For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured.