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.

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

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

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.

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

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