It's like an angel crying on your tongue.

You always think, no matter how many times you fail, that the next time you will succeed. Otherwise you wouldn't keep trying.

There is a place for visionaries and the avant-garde in this world, but not at 9 o'clock on a network.

When you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth years of a show, it's really good to have held back, so that you have somewhere to go. That also applies to levels of violence, levels of humor, levels of production value.

It's easy to leave people wanting more after the first episode, but it's hard to leave people wanting more after the 24th episode. And it's my job, more than anybody else's, to keep that in mind. One season, in TV terms, is nothing. You need to hit it for three or four seasons, and then you're doing well, in TV terms. Then, you've done your job.

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.

The evil of storytelling is you're trying to make the audience complicit in murder - 'Kill the guy! Jump him!' And then once you've done it, it's like, 'I've killed this guy, now what?