I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

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.

The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.

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

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

You just do the best you can, and when you're able to connect with people, and when you do, it's just incredibly gratifying.

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.