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" For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Me
Want
Story
Related Quotes:
" I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Companion
Window
Television
" We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Culture
Live
Real
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Myself
Good
Bureaucracy
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Detective
True
Time
" It's better to not have a reputation than a bad one. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Better
Reputation
Than
" I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Find
Drama
Down
" Often, what allows someone to behave heroically in dire circumstances is unpalatable in day-to-day life. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Someone
Circumstances
Behave
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Got
Real
Good
" If you are a certain kind of hands-on learner and have been in a writers room and know how scripts get made, and you know what pre-production is, then mostly it's making sure the actors get what they need, and you are providing creative oversight while allowing room for everyone else to own the material, too. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Kind
Creative
You
" I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Vision
Else
Come
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Personal
Degree
Connect
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Reality
Me
Exploration
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Place
Quality
Years
" Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Escape
World
Art
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Dream
Me
Nothing
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Reading
Early
Wave
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Hustle
Frustration
Ending
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Connect
You
People
" Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Up
Thought
Television
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Get
Ideas
Pilot
" Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Easy
Emotion
Short
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Working
Summer
Thinking
" Nothing in the television show 'True Detective' was plagiarized. "
Nic Pizzolatto
True
Television
Show
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Want
Business
Meetings
" Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Earth
Influence
Life
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Someone
Story
Think
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
True
Yourself
You
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Moment
Black
Heart
" The work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Reaction
Where
Feel
" 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. "
Nic Pizzolatto
Narrative
Writing
Theory