This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.

[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.