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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm not in the service business.

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.