Death showed up in my life very early on, so I’m aware of it. If you look at most of the things I write there’s a sort of contemplation of mortality – although ‘True Blood’...

I think it’s very difficult, and it requires a tremendous amount of spiritual integrity and discipline, to not be a narcissist in a culture that encourages it every step of the way.

You cannot hold a child accountable to the same standards that you hold an adult accountable to.

The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don’t have the leisure of time in television.

I need to feel like the work I’m doing is not necessarily important, but meaningful, at least to me, because otherwise it just becomes a day job. It just becomes factory work and I get...

I’m a Buddhist, so one of my biggest beliefs is, ‘Everything changes, don’t take it personally.’

I’d seen ‘Interview with A Vampire’ and saw Dracula movies growing up, but I never thought, ‘I love vampires; I have to do a show about vampires.’

I definitely see the good in people. Certainly in my own life I strive to be somebody who is functional and well adjusted and can face conflict in a non-emotional and non-destructive way, and those...

It’s easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group. It’s also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and...

You know, I’m gay and I grew up being aware of that at a very early age, in a fairly repressed family.

Not everything is going to be successful. To strive for that is really naive. You just do the best you can do.

I really feel like my goal, and I don’t always achieve it, is to do the best work I can do, and stay out of the results. Because ultimately, the result is not what the...

Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to...

I’m from the South, so while I personally find it impossible to live there, I still have a fondness for it as a geographical region.

I think all writers are armchair psychologists to some degree or another, and I think a character’s sexuality is fascinating. It’s a great way to really get at the root of their identity, because it’s...

Directing is physically exciting because there’s a ticking clock, you’re working with people, it’s very social, it’s very enjoyable.

I don’t really know what it is about vampires that makes them such a powerful symbol, metaphor, whatever in people’s consciousness. But I do know they’re tremendously powerful. I mean, there’s a vampire on ‘Sesame...

Obviously death is a theme I’m fascinated by.

I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part,...

There is a fetishization of victimization in our culture. And I just am not interested in victimhood.

If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.

I’m not like J.K. Rowling, where I know there’s going to be this number of seasons, and I know exactly what’s going to happen. I would be so bored if that was the case. There...

Racism is ridiculous no matter where it’s coming from.

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It’s an incredibly nourishing process; it’s probably the closest I come to having a religion.

And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was...

I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.