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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The ideas within this philosophy are certainly not exclusive to any writer.

I'm not in the service business.

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.

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdycommon sense of a burgher-class in the making.

Your words are determined by what dwells in you

I stopped living a long time ago, in order to simply exist. Now I am trying to leave existence, in order to step into nihility.

My kids are so much better parent than I was.

In order to go beyond ideas to direct realization, it's essential to have a great deal of purity.

I just give off this kind of feminine vibe which has... served me so well with women in my life.

I consider the television set as the American fireplace, around which the whole family will gather.

The function of the artist is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.

We must endeavor to forget our former love for them [the British] and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.