When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience's mind week after week.

I have a ways to go as a novelist. But what's great is, well, I frankly enjoyed the solitude. And I enjoyed being able to tell characters what to say and do without negotiating with an actor.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

I'm one of three brothers.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

We're not allowed to carry out harsh interrogations anymore, but we're allowed to fly over somebody's village, without due process, and kill them all?

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.