Nic Pizzolatto Quotes

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

I'm not in the service business.

The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Some people, no matter where they look, they see themselves.

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

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.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.