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.

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.

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

We learn and experience ourselves only through suffering

Honor is due to God and to persons of great excellence as a sign of attestation of excellence already existing

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one.

I think we, sometimes, try to fill a void with so many other things that we make the wound deeper & prevent it from ever healing properly.

I never dress to shock.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

Flaws would not only bring death but, far worse, humiliation.

There is a world elsewhere.