For me, suspense is always harder and better than going for the quick, outright scare.

One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'

The best crime reporters don't mind charging in - but they also know how to do it as decent human beings.

I am not someone who has hobbies. I have tried knitting, and I can't figure it out.

I'm probably a guy's girl, although I hate that phrase. I tend to have more close male friends than I do female friends, and I always have. I would say that of my 10 close friends, seven are men.

I don't think I'm naturally a good person. I think some people have an innate goodness to them, and I am sort of proud of the fact that I kind of keep myself in check, probably because I have awesome parents.

Even good characters have their dark sides, and I think it is important that women aren't seen as innately good.

I always loved ghost stories and haunted house stories, whether they were done in a fantasy way or done in a realistic way.

I love a good worst-case scenario. My brain just kind of works that way. I like that idea of how much a person can get away with, and why.

I just think - the Midwest, if you grow up there, you're deathly afraid of putting on airs. Any time a Midwesterner criticizes someone, it's usually involving some form of being too big for your britches.

I find, the older I get, the more surprised I am about how hesitant people are to say what they really want, what they really dream about, what really drives them. It's as if sometimes we're sort of embarrassed, as we get older, to be transparent about that. But you save so much time if you're transparent about what you want.

I grew up in a house full of books.

I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.

I think it's a very female trait to want to please men and to want to be considered the Cool Girl. And if you take that to the farthest reach, where you're actually selling yourself out and degrading yourself by doing things you don't actually want to do, only in order for this man to think that you do, that's a very perverse thing.

I love video games.

One of my rules about writing exercises is you never are allowed to put them in your book because it's just too tempting. You try to shoehorn things that don't belong.

I'm not much of a procedural person. That's not what I'm interested in.

You don't normally see incredibly ugly people who've gone missing and it becomes a sensation.

A theme that has always interested me is how women express anger, how women express violence. That is very much part of who women are, and it's so unaddressed. A vast amount of literature deals with cycles of violence about men, antiheroes. Women lack that vocabulary.

That's always been part of my goal - to show the dark side of women. Men write about bad men all the time, and they're called antiheroes.

Women shouldn't be expected to only play nurturing, kind caretakers.

A great thriller, to me, is more about creating a sense of unease: a queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right.

A really great popcorn movie is extremely hard to pull off. A really great popcorn book is equally hard to pull off, so I don't feel guilty devouring one.

I like westerns, fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, thrillers, and I try to avoid the word 'genre' altogether. A good book is a good book.