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

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.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

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.

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