Quotes from Nic Pizzolatto

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

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.

When you're a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can't even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius' 'The Meditations,' that changes your life.

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

TV and film were always governing passions of mine, and that first wave of great HBO shows in the early years of the millennium was feeding my desire for fiction more than the books I was reading.

As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.

There are websites of 'True Detective' artwork out there now, and it's beautiful. And I don't want to take that away from anybody. I know what it means to me. But I don't want to take away anyone's interpretation of the show.

The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have a conspiracy.

'The Atlantic' really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

I liked teaching, but the bureaucracy of academia and the petty intrigue... It wasn't a good fit. Once I admitted that myself, that I didn't like academia, I was ready to try TV.

If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.

Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.

Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life.

I left the University of Chicago's creative writing program for a tenure-track job at DePauw University in Indiana, then left DePauw in 2010 for Los Angeles.

If you are a certain kind of hands-on learner and have been in a writers room and know how scripts get made, and you know what pre-production is, then mostly it's making sure the actors get what they need, and you are providing creative oversight while allowing room for everyone else to own the material, too.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

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

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

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 enjoy a third act, and I like stories with ending. A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don't have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it's their last year and often have to hustle to invent a third act, but they were never necessarily organically meaning to begin with.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

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.

I'd want to bring a flamethrower to faculty meetings. The preciousness of academics and their fragile personalities would not be tolerated in any other business in the known universe.