I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.

There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

I'm certainly not a trained singer. The only place I could probably carry a tune is my shower.

Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer.

That honeymoon phase is so much fun in real life, when you meet and discover somebody new and fall in love and chase them. The pursuit. And that climactic final moment of ultimate togetherness.

Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.

Ninety percent of the time, I'm wearing imaginary people's clothing. I don't feel a huge pressure to go out and like, hit the town, hit the boutiques.