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

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.

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

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

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

Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life.

I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.