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

I made True Detective like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.

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.

Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.

Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.

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.

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