I'm very hard on myself when it comes to writing.

In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives.

That's just me wanting that supernatural tool to tell a story and also not wanting to be restricted by reality, with how we're telling a tale, because we are a heightened reality on Hannibal. There is a larger-than-life quality to the storytelling when it gets into particulars. I like the idea of being able to dismiss reality, depending on if we can sell it as part of the story.

You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it?

I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."

It's very interesting to blur the line between eating human beings and eating animals, because I do think people should think more about what they put in their bodies, whether it is nutritionally or philosophically.

It would be pathological narcissism to assume that that person had to live how I live.