Doing good stuff or stuff that you are proud of takes time and takes effort.

TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

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

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions.

Where I came from, no one was a writer.

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.

In a novel, the only budgetary limitations are that of your imagination.