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

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.

Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.

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.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

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.