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.

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

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

I made True Detective like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

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.

Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.