The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

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

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.

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

The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

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

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.