Gillian Flynn Quotes

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

I have a hatred of familiarity. If I feel like I am doing something I've done before, it feels old and done. I feel I have no choice but to strike out in directions that feel new - anything less just doesn't seem worth it.

I always wanted to do something different with each film. So I guess that means that I wanted to not repeat myself. There has to be some kind of a new element in each project that I take up.

Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.

I hate to repeat lines, to say the same damned thing. I try to rewrite cliches and make what I say sound fresh.

There are no really new stories anymore.

I think it's more important to make a lot of different things and keep coming up with new images and things that were never made before, than to do one thing and do it well.

All an audience wants to believe is that what's going on is happening for the first time.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.

You don't want to play the same role twice.

With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.

I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.

The most valuable thing in culture is to find something first - so everyone is always looking.

Agents and publishers are always looking for something 'different,' a fresh viewpoint and a new voice, not just re-hashed versions of stuff that's gone before.

I always try to do movies that are different from the ones I've done before.

It's pretty rare that something I've written is close to something that's pre-existed.

What makes a book unique isn't always about having one big grand new idea. It's about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.

I didn't want to write the same book over and over.

If you see in all my books, I have two key intentions. One is obviously to entertain and make sure that the reader has a good reading experience. I also try to write on subjects that nobody has dealt with before to make my works different from other page turners.

I have to challenge myself, and I have to challenge the reader. We should be weaving and working on new stories and not the same story over and over.

If your entire conception of what's possible in fantasy only comes from other fantasy books, you're going to go on to create a copy of a copy of a copy. There's nothing original there, nothing dynamic. Which is fine if that's your goal, but I've always wanted to do something no one else was doing before.