Gillian Flynn Quotes

I am drawn to Americana, and I am drawn to gothic stories, and I love American gothic stories.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

The horror genre is vast and full of brilliance. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Herman Melville, the book of Esther. I'll happily join that list.

I would say that in my black readership, more of my readers tolerate the horror aspect of my work, you know. 'I don't usually read this kind of stuff, but.'

'Evil' is quite a blanket term. People aren't the demonic characters we would like them to be sometimes.

I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.

The interesting part of the process is developing the character, you know, why did he become that? Why is the guy a murderer, or why is this guy a pervert, or whatever he is. So that's the fun part for me to delve into the abyss.

There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.

We've had crooks from the beginning of time... it's always very interesting and troubling why good people do bad things.

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

I think as long as I can tell you a story about people that you understand, it doesn't matter if you don't like what they do; you understand why they did it.

I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe, and I loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies.

The reality is that 'Westworld' is designed so that guests can indulge with impunity their every fantasy - be it light or dark. So the hosts experience the extremes in human behavior, good and bad.

Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

I learned a lot about the law at Harvard Law School, but no one taught me about why a 20-year old black male in a tough neighborhood feels like he needs to be armed. Nobody taught me about what attracts kids to join gangs.... It is difficult to stand in judgment of other human beings without understanding human beings.

Technology itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad.

There is nothing in the whole frame of man which seems to me so unaccountable as that thing called conscience.

Ethics, politics and psychology are all far more difficult to understand now that we know the depths to which human nature can sink.

With books like 'AD: After Death' and 'Wytches,' a lot of those things are inspired by reading things that terrify me.

You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

It's great to be able to play the 'bad guy' role, because you always get a lot to do, but I'm always looking at the why - how does a person get to that particular point.