Gillian Flynn Quote
You ever hear about those wildfires near San Bernardino, back in 1999, they destroyed, like eighty homes and about ninety thousand acres? I shrugged. Seemed like California was always on fire. I was the kid who set that fire. Not on purpose. Or at least, I didn’t mean for it to get out of control. What? I was only a kid, twelve years old, and I wasn’t a firebug or anything, but I’d ended up with a lighter, a cigarette lighter, I can’t even remember why I had it, but I liked flicking it, you know, and I was hiking back in the hills behind my development, bored, and the trail was just, covered, with old grasses and stuff. And I was walking along, flicking the lighter, just seeing if I could get the tops of the weeds to catch, they had these fuzzy tips— Foxtail. And I turned around, and … and they’d all caught on fire. There were about twenty mini-fires behind me, like torches. And it was during the Santa Anas, so the tops started blowing away, and they’d land and catch another patch on fire, and then blow another hundred feet. And then it wasn’t just small fires here and there. It was a big fire. That fast? Yeah, in just those seconds, it was a fire.
You ever hear about those wildfires near San Bernardino, back in 1999, they destroyed, like eighty homes and about ninety thousand acres? I shrugged. Seemed like California was always on fire. I was the kid who set that fire. Not on purpose. Or at least, I didn’t mean for it to get out of control. What? I was only a kid, twelve years old, and I wasn’t a firebug or anything, but I’d ended up with a lighter, a cigarette lighter, I can’t even remember why I had it, but I liked flicking it, you know, and I was hiking back in the hills behind my development, bored, and the trail was just, covered, with old grasses and stuff. And I was walking along, flicking the lighter, just seeing if I could get the tops of the weeds to catch, they had these fuzzy tips— Foxtail. And I turned around, and … and they’d all caught on fire. There were about twenty mini-fires behind me, like torches. And it was during the Santa Anas, so the tops started blowing away, and they’d land and catch another patch on fire, and then blow another hundred feet. And then it wasn’t just small fires here and there. It was a big fire. That fast? Yeah, in just those seconds, it was a fire.
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About Gillian Flynn
Flynn wrote the script for the 2014 film adaptation of Gone Girl, directed by David Fincher. For it she won the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for the Writers Guild of America and the BAFTA awards, among others.
The author also wrote and produced the HBO limited series adaptation of Sharp Objects, for which she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy and the Writers Guild of America Award. Flynn also co-wrote with director Steve McQueen the screenplay of the film Widows (2018).
She has also served as showrunner, writer, and executive producer on Amazon Prime Video's sci-fi thriller series Utopia (2020), which ran for one season.
She is currently writing her fourth novel; it is set to be published by Penguin Random House.