People talk about overnight successes, and ultimately, there's a certain amount of, you want to call it luck or fortune or good fortune, or whatever, but when your moment arrives, you have to have been at a point where you paid your dues, or done your 10,000 hours or have the requisite talent or whatever.

In television, I don't feel constraints. I feel a lot freedom to maneuver.

My gravestone will say,'Here Lies Damon Lindelof - Or Does He?

For us, there's an inherent process when you're ending something to be thinking about the beginning, as writers.

I've always felt that really good prequels should be original movies.

But I do think that, when you slow the conveyor belt down, the quality control tends to go up. You have a lot more time between seasons to talk about what worked and what didn't work, and plan for the future. And the pacing of the storytelling, particularly for on-going serialized dramas, means that you don't need to do non-essential episodes, just because you have to fill this pre-existing schedule.

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