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

Red Dragon's my favorite of the books, because it is written with such a poet's ear. Whenever it gets really flowery and poetic and it's dialogue, chances are that's a Thomas Harris quote of some kind that's kind of been repurposed or reinterpreted or re-imagined somehow. That's where a lot of that poetry comes from.

I think because it is a very well-saturated story,episode of Justified in Hannibal, and we've all heard it in some frame of a story, we've heard the urban legend of waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing. It felt like if we are telling an organ-harvesting story, it was really about quickly selling the iconography of an organ-harvesting story, and then being able to mask that as a perfect way for Hannibal Lecter to go shopping for his menu.

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

I'm not always successful, but I take my job as a storyteller very seriously and want to make sure the audience has as much fun watching it as I am creating it.

Television production is so insane. There's so many moving parts and flying pieces and you're desperate to make it cohesive and artistic and have something to say about the human condition that feels like it has value to its existence.

As a horror movie fan, I was very obsessed with horror films. Still am. I love the genre. For me, horror films are opera, and they are... instead of consumption killing off the young lovers, it's Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. It is when the stakes are at their absolute largest in a story: whether somebody is going to live or die. In a way, it's just holding up a mirror to life.