Nic Pizzolatto Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I left the University of Chicago's creative writing program for a tenure-track job at DePauw University in Indiana, then left DePauw in 2010 for Los Angeles.

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 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.

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 Harts voices.

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 writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.