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.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people...

My own belief is that people can come back from anything. It doesn’t mean that it won’t come at a huge cost.

It’s a lot harder to find fault with the mundane details of daily existence when you really, really know on a cellular level that you’re going to go, and that this moment, right now, is...

I know a lot of shows are like, ‘Here’s the pages,’ right before they start filming. I’d have a heart attack. The anxiety would be way too much for me. I don’t have as strong...

Life is infinitely complex, and I feel like we live in a culture that really seems to want to simplify it into sound bites and bromides, and that does not work.

The idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous. To me, vampires are sex. I don’t get a vampire story about abstinence. I don’t care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

Ultimately, physical resemblance isn’t as important as whether this person can bring this character to life in a way that’s compelling and makes me care about what happens to them.

Life is too mysterious to try to map it out. I’ve certainly lived long enough to know it will take you places you never thought it would take you – and some of those places...

Vampires are total sexual metaphors; there’s just no way around that.

The ego is kind of a big, unwieldy thing. It’s not so easily tamed or subdued.

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all...