The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images.

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time is really the stuff that interests me.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

The entertainment world, television, movies, social media, YouTube stuff, we're so bombarded with so much imagery and such a great sense of inhumanity, and there is a coarseness, a coarsening of interaction.

Hill Street Blues gave me an opportunity to work with an ensemble cast of people whose work I admired.