Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

I think the best work flows out of a collaborative environment.

You have to give directors and cinematographers a word blueprint for visuals, but I had to learn that from experience.

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.

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