As human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by — so you’d better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

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

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

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

It’s better to not have a reputation than a bad one.

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.

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