Top 350 Gillian Flynn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Always have a backup plan to the backup plan.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

3. “There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child – you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die.”

— Gillian Flynn

4. “I’ve suffered betrayal with all five senses. For over a year.”

— Gillian Flynn

5. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

6. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

7. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

9. “A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”

— Gillian Flynn

10. “I often don’t say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: In my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you’d never guess from looking at me.”

— Gillian Flynn

11. “I had no sympathy for drama queens.”

— Gillian Flynn

12. “Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial – you’d think all women do is clean and bleed.”

— Gillian Flynn

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 “There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.”

— Gillian Flynn

14. “Safer to be feared than loved.”

— Gillian Flynn

15. “Just got to keep on keeping on.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

17. “The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty – we all have it.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

19. “Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

21. “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.”

— Gillian Flynn

22. “Money is wasted on the rich.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

24. “There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child – you grow up knowing you aren’t allowed to disappoint, you’re not even allowed to die. There isn’t a replacement toddling around; you’re it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.”

— Gillian Flynn

25. “It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I’m not a real person and neither is anyone else.”

— Gillian Flynn

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26. “The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right experts.”

— Gillian Flynn

27. “I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

29. “Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life.”

— Gillian Flynn

30. “How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?”

— Gillian Flynn

31. “Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.”

— Gillian Flynn

32. “Coffee goes great with sudden death.”

— Gillian Flynn

33. “I eat beef jerky and ride with bare feet on the dashboard. We.”

— Gillian Flynn

34. “What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart.”

— Gillian Flynn

35. “I like the discipline of writing a script. You can’t go into the character’s head – you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they’re thinking.”

— Gillian Flynn

36. “Don’t be discouraged – every relationship you have is a failure, until you find the right one.”

— Gillian Flynn

37. “The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you, my mother used to say whenever I resisted her grooming.”

— Gillian Flynn

38. “Because you can’t be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it’s always waiting to return. Like the world’s sweetest cancer.”

— Gillian Flynn

39. “I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.”

— Gillian Flynn

40. “People are strange.”

— Gillian Flynn

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

— Gillian Flynn

42. “Worries find you easily enough without inviting them.”

— Gillian Flynn

43. “I’m tired of dying.”

— Gillian Flynn

44. “I like rules that make sense, not rules without logic.”

— Gillian Flynn

45. “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.’”

— Gillian Flynn

46. “I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.”

— Gillian Flynn

47. “I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.”

— Gillian Flynn

48. “I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like.”

— Gillian Flynn

49. “I rolled my eyes and set my head in my hands, as if it was too much for me, and it almost was.”

— Gillian Flynn

50. “It was one of the few stories we told the same way.”

— Gillian Flynn