Top 50 Nic Pizzolatto Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto

3. “I didn’t come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else’s vision.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

4. “We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they’re told something is fiction.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

5. “I read The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writers ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

6. “Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

7. “Whatever story you’re telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

8. “Certain experiences you can’t survive, and afterward you don’t fully exist, even if you failed to die.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

9. “Some people, no matter where they look, they see themselves.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

10. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

11. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

12. “Vision is meaning. Meaning is historical.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

13. “The Atlantic really gave me my writing career – even just the conviction to be a writer.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

14. “I made True Detective like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto

16. “The past isn’t real.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto

19. “Clarity, I think, is the chief thing. Find a road and walk it.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

20. “I knew the past wasn’t real. It was only an idea, and the thing I’d wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn’t name – it just didn’t exist. It was only an idea, too.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

21. “You just do the best you can, and when you’re able to connect with people, and when you do, it’s just incredibly gratifying.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

22. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

23. “Back then it felt like life was not just one thing; it could be other things. Then one day it felt like the exact opposite; life was one thing and one thing only, a wait.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

24. “The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

25. “If I write scripts that nobody likes, I don’t think we’ll be doing ‘True Detective.’”

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto

27. “You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

28. “Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

29. “In this climate all things seek shade, and so a basic quality of the Deep South is that everything here is partially hidden.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

30. “I’m not in the service business.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

31. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

32. “I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

33. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto

35. “You look less suspicious when you’re willing to meet people.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

36. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

37. “If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I’m familiar with it and I already have a take on it.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

38. “I don’t think you can create effectively toward expectation. I’m not in the service business.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

39. “Some seagulls strutted the parking lot with a kind of haughty entitlement that made me think of clergy.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

40. “Still, there was a bored sadness to her. And a resignation I’d seen on faces my whole life – people giving up, crossing over to that place without struggle – and I wanted to alter that.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

41. “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 Harts voices.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

42. “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.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

43. “The work is where I tend to feel pressure – not so much in the reaction to it.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

44. “I was worried I’d live forever.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

45. “An army of empty High Life cans covered the floor around the chair – an actual army, because I’d used a knife to cut little strips out of the can sides so that they folded down, like arms, and I’d pulled the tops upright to resemble heads.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

46. “For both of us the landscape had a gravity that tugged us backward in time, possessed us with people we used to be.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

47. “It’s better to not have a reputation than a bad one.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

48. “In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

49. “She was weak, a clever woman who willed herself stupid.”

— Nic Pizzolatto

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

— Nic Pizzolatto