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.

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

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.

I think women do have that fatal streak to them that's partly because it's been romanticized, the martyr complex - 'Look what you did to me!'

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

I had been laid off from 'Entertainment Weekly 'right before I started writing 'Gone Girl.'

I was very lucky to grow up in a household that really valued storytelling and didn't find it frivolous.

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

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.

To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.

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.

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.

I've always been a mystery fan. My very first grown-up book, I distinctly remember going to the library and my mom helping me pick out an Agatha Christie book. I was in fifth grade or something and very proud of being in the adult fiction aisles. I tore through 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles.'

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.

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.

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.

The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?

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

'Rosemary's Baby' is one of my all-time favorite books. I love that it just ends with, you know, 'Hey, the devil's in the world, and guess what? Mom kind of likes him!' And that's the end.

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.

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.

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

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

There are no really new stories anymore.

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

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

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

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

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I watched 'Psycho' a million times.

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.

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.

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 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.''

The newspaper industry was built on the penny dreadfuls.

Women are just as violently minded as men are, but with men, it's taken for granted.

I tend to write about dark things that happen in a very domestic setting 'cause that, to me, is much scarier than the unknown.

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?'

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

Kansas City is truly an awesome town.

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