Quotes from Nic Pizzolatto

It's better to not have a reputation than a bad one.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it.

We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.

You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don't know what they're talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.

If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.'

If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.

Nothing in the television show 'True Detective' was plagiarized.

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.

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.

'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

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 writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all.

It's your job to come up with compelling characters who speak to an individual authenticity. If I'm not interested in the characters, I can't go on. I have to be fascinated by them.

The work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.

I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.

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

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.