Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

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

As an insecure writer, I'll finish a scene and worry there's a better version of it. Or it could be elevated somehow.

We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.

Relationships are now off-kilter.

Our idea for Hannibal Lecter is that he's very reactionary - he's somebody who can adapt really well to circumstances.

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.