D. B. WEISS

When I put a quarter into an arcade machine or call up an emulated game on my computer, I do it to escape the world that is a slave to the time that makes things fall apart. I have never played these games to occupy my world.

The Classic games were Classic because, like classical music or architecture, they strove to give life and weight to ideals of order and proportion, to provide a vision of timelessness. In 'Double Dragon,' we can see the cracks in the brick, the mold growing on the drainage pipes, the unmistakable deterioration of the world we live in.

Who doesn't love 'Frogger?' It draws its power from our shared memories of powerlessness. Wherever we are now, at one time or another we have all felt the poor frog's anxiety in the face of the world's intransigence, its blind and callous disregard for our happiness or well-being.

I think the main reason is that people binge watch because they can. We're like dogs, really. If we like something, we tend to gorge ourselves on it until there's no more left. And as bingeing becomes possible and commonplace, it's only natural that shows should start to take it into account.

Writing can be a very isolating profession. By its very nature, you spend a lot of your time barricaded in your house or office, typing on your own.

I would watch the remaining 12 or so episodes of 'Breaking Bad' I haven't seen by noon tomorrow, but my wife would kill me. I watched all five seasons of 'The Wire' in a month, and she was not happy about it.

Man, 'Hill Street Blues' was on when I was 12, and I remember feeling I'd never seen anything like it. It was that far ahead of its time, with dark characters you loved.

One of the trickiest things about 'Game of Thrones' is just seeding those first couple of episodes with that basic information that people need to know, both about the world and the ground rules of the world, and the relationships between the characters, as far as who means what to whom and why.

Would I have watched another season of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. Would I have watched another two seasons of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. The fact that I would easily have watched much, much more than I got made the ending so much more poignant and stronger and better for me.

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.

We do have pictures on the wall, in our office in Belfast where we spend half our time. All the head shots are on the wall. So yeah, we just throw darts at the ones we don't want anymore.

I remember when my first child was born, and I had a script that was due, and I asked the guy I was writing it for, a guy who I'm now friends with but at the time was not friend with, 'Can I have some extra time? I had a kid born.' He's like, 'No, we need it now.'

There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.

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've learned a lot about how information needs to flow effectively amongst a group of people. They need to be fed information, and it needs to be on this constant conveyor belt.

To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way.

I think that everything starts to go to hell when you start smelling your own farts and complimenting yourself on how great they smell. We're not going to turn into fart-smellers.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.

Being away from home for six months of the year and seeing your kids grow up on Skype all that time - I think I saw Molly walk for the first time on Skype. That's not good.

Your pupillary muscles relax when your body gives up.

You realize, no matter how great, books are not shows or movies; each operates on their own different rules. 'Game of Thrones' is no different. Being forced to come up with those scenes on short notice helped how we were viewing the show and forcing it to come into its own.

Jason Momoa became a really good friend of ours when he played Khal Drogo. We loved hanging out with Momoa, and suddenly we couldn't bring him to Belfast anymore.

I would never try to invalidate someone's opinion of something or the feelings something makes them feel.

I like to think of myself as a 'Mord the jailer' type.