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People are fascinated by the darker sides of human nature, and I think they're also interested in seeing the ability that a particular detective or group of detectives might have to solve the crime and put the world right again.

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 don't know that I am fascinated with crime. I'm fascinated with people and their characters and their obsessions and what they do. And these things lead to crime, but I'm much more fascinated in their minds.

Do people really believe there's something different about the eyes of murderers?

In reality, serial killers are of average intelligence.

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.

Crime shapes how we think about the world; it shapes social decisions that we make; it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.

There's an overlap between social-realist fiction and crime fiction - a sweet spot there.

I'm not a great student, so I don't know that I would have been a great detective. Part of my brain sort of works that way, like wanting to figure out puzzles and figure out what happened and why people do the things they do and who they are and how it happened.