NIC PIZZOLATTO

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

'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.

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.

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.