The best jokes on The Leftovers are the ones that make you feel a little sick to your stomach.

All great sci-fi is: Be careful what you wish for.

I think that we, as writers, get excited by risk. When we are feeling comfortable and familiar, I wouldn't say that we get bored, but the energy in the room gets flat. When we're most excited and when the show is the most fun, it's when we're duking things out.

If you're constantly hamstrung by worry that people aren't going to like it, you can't do your job.

I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.

I'm not glass-half-full, glass-half-empty; I'm like, "There's a glass?"

At some point, you can't take a risk just to take a risk because that's a betrayal, in and of itself.