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

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

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.

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.

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