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.

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

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.

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

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

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.