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You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

It makes it harder to write if I watch a lot of television, because television is not like a written story.

I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

I think of myself as a guy who tries to write screenplays and now has tried to direct one. Anything more than that is meaningless and it gets in the way of being a real human being.

That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.

TV writing is tricky to navigate because you have so many different personalities - the actors, multiple producers.