Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm not in the service business.
It’s better to not have a reputation than a bad one.
It's better to not have a reputation than a bad one.
Some people, no matter where they look, they see themselves.
Nothing in the television show 'True Detective' was plagiarized.
I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.
The ideas within this philosophy are certainly not exclusive to any writer.
Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.
The work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it.
Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.
If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don't think we'll be doing 'True Detective.'
The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.
I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.
'The Atlantic' really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.
I was raised in a heavily Catholic family. Early and consistent encounters with mysticism.
The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.
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.
I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.
Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.
Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.
Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life.
If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.
For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.
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.
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.
We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I knew 'True Detective' wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop. But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience.
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.
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.
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.
For the finale, I thought the audience deserved to get a close point of view on the monster, and to recognize him the way you recognize the heroes of 'True Detective.'
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 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.
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.
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 knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
'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.
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.
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.