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

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.

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.

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.

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

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