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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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