Nic Pizzolatto Quotes

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.

I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

You can't really judge an actor's abilities by their career, because the business is going to pigeonhole people into whatever turns a profit, and no artist is less in charge of how their work is presented than an actor, the appeal of Vince was that within a great naturalism, he can convey fierce intelligence, complex emotion, and a real warmth married to a real edge, strength and vulnerability and danger and humor. There are essential contradictions at work that makes him fascinating to watch.

The ideas within this philosophy are certainly not exclusive to any writer.

You just do the best you can, and when you're able to connect with people, and when you do, it's just incredibly gratifying.

I'm not in the service business.

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.

As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.

I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.

As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.

The work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it.

Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.

The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.

Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.

I made True Detective like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.'

And if we’re talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it.

Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

Some people, no matter where they look, they see themselves.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

It’s better to not have a reputation than a bad one.