Lawrence Gilliard Jr. is a fine actor and I've always felt some residual guilt that we killed him so early in The Wire. It was always planned that way; we didn't kill him because of anything he did, we don't kill off actors just to do it.

There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader ... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so the person I started writing for was the homicide detective.

When we were kids coming up, if you stole your dad's Playboy magazine, that was about as much of an education as you were gonna get. You finish looking at the centrefold and you read 'The Playboy Adviser' that told you about what stereo to buy and something about sex which you didn't quite understand, and you were still just as confused. Now if you're ten the entire world of human sexuality, and a very misogynistic version of that, is available to you on a laptop after a couple of key strokes. I think it's changed the vernacular in the way men address women.

It is your birthright to live a life abundant in love. Make the commitment today to open your heart and let your love flow.

The murder clearance rate now in my city Baltimore is almost non-existent. Nobody can solve a murder, nobody can do any actual police work, because they've learned how to do bad police work, chase drugs. Fighting vice, while being unable to respond to sin. Generations of cops have learned how not to police work by policing the drug war. Not only are they police brutal, they're ineffective. Baltimore is more violent than it has ever been in modern history.

In the wake of Katrina, what you're witnessing and what we are very careful to depict is a form of patriotism.

I would be lying if I said the journalism doesn't reflect my own choices as a reporter and a writer: what to say, what to emphasize, how to say it, what is true or untrue.