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.

I'm not in the service business.

As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.

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 was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

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

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