Choices are much more practical and small when you’re dealing with a real story. It’s about execution, it’s not about content.

Baltimore’s often called the most northern Southern town. It has a distinct essence. It’s definitely post-industrial, definitely Rust Belt, very working-class. I grew up outside of Washington, and I felt I was moving to a completely different place when I moved 30 miles north out of college.

On a practical level I’m a TV producer and storyteller who’s gone about as long as you can go without achieving a mass audience.

It’s been said that no man is a hero to a newspaperman, and I spent too many years as an ink-stained wretch.

To be told you’ve won a MacArthur fellowship is very flattering and gratifying personally.

It is the unrepentant worship of statistics that forms the true orthodoxy of any modern police department.

A TV show can’t hold people and institutions to account like good journalism can.

You shoot another guy – well, okay, this is Baltimore. You shoot three guys, it’s time to admit you have a problem.

More people pay attention to fiction and to narrative than pay attention to journalism. That’s quite sad. More people pay attention to television than to prose. That’s equally sad, if not more so.

You have the capacity to change the plotline of your life, even if you’ve been acting from the same script since before you can remember.