Nic Pizzolatto Quotes

She reminded me of the empty glass of a swallowed cocktail, and at the heart of the empty glass was a smashed lime rind on ice.

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.

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

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

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.

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.

Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better.

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

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.

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.

For the rest of the day, her weight echoed in my empty hands, light but dense, her throes and kicks.

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

The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.

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.

Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink black to red to purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was hidden in those shadows.

When it worked, reading could take away the burden of time.

And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.

We come here to tell stories so that we can manage the past without being swallowed by it.

You steer down lightless highways, and you invent a destination because movement is key.

You can't really judge an actor's abilities by their career, because the business is going to pigeonhole people into whatever turns a profit, and no artist is less in charge of how their work is presented than an actor, the appeal of Vince was that within a great naturalism, he can convey fierce intelligence, complex emotion, and a real warmth married to a real edge, strength and vulnerability and danger and humor. There are essential contradictions at work that makes him fascinating to watch.

You look less suspicious when you're willing to meet people.

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

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

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.

When I read I got involved in the words and what they were saying so that I didn't measure the passing of time in typical ways. I was surprised to learn that there was this freedom made of nothing but words. Then I felt like I had missed some crucial point, a long time ago.

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.

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.

'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.

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 remember a buddy of mine once telling me that every woman you loved was a mother and sister you didn't have, at once, and that what you were always really looking for was the female part of yourself, your female animal or something. This guy could get away with saying something like that because he was a junkie and read books.

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.

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.

Martin Hart: Can I ask you something? You're a Christian, yeah?
Rustin Cohle: No.
Martin Hart: Well, whadaya got the cross for, in your apartment?
Rustin Cohle: It's a form of meditation.
Martin Hart: How's that?
Rustin Cohle: I contemplate the moment in the garden; the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.

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 give her the truth, then maybe I am released of its obligations. I can pass the truth to its rightful owner, and the frozen stars in my chest might finally ignite.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Now you might picture your next story, your second one, but don't be too definite, don't make a vision you might cling to, or create an idea you lose yourself in. Don't look at a map and ponder the depth of the Yellow Sea; don't imagine the shapes of its waves. Don't contemplate lost parents or lost girls. Resist the urge to explain their stories, because eventually you've got to understand that an answer isn't the same thing as a solution, and a story is sometimes only an excuse.

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

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

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

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.'

Now and then she looked harassed by her own potential, like certain young people, and you might notice then the way a stillness spread through her eyes, and her unguarded face forgot to play a role, just look stunned by confusion and remorse, while the features of this face were organized by a kind of country pride that wouldn't admit confusion or remorse.

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

I think the reason men liked her was because she gave off high levels of carnality. You looked at her and just knew - this one's up for anything. It's sexy, but you can't really stand it.