I don't know how people do this job collaboratively if they don't really get along. You're spending all day every day for months and years on end with somebody.

After you do this for a while, you get used to things not working the way you want them to. There's a job you want, and you don't get it. There's a movie you'd like to get made, and it doesn't get made. You become inured to it.

If a superhero knocks over a building, and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they're not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it's the worst thing we've ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction.

We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.

You thrive in your career when you thrive with yourself.

I wasn't funny as a kid. I remember enjoying comedians, but I never understood it was a job choice or a profession.

Certainly for some time, people used to think of my solo career as somehow a side project to Porcupine Tree. No. If anything, the opposite would now have to be the case.

The one thing I didn't do that was kind of controversial was go work for a daily paper, because I didn't like that kind of journalism, and I'm glad I didn't because that's the business model that's going totally extinct.