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" 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. "

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" 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

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

" 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 work is where I tend to feel pressure - not so much in the reaction to it. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

Exploration

" 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. "

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

" 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

Nothing

" The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something. "

" 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.' "

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

" Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand. "

Nic Pizzolatto

Want

Story

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "