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.