[on Detective Lt. Everett Backstrom in the 'Backstrom' series] He's awful. He's just awful. In the books, Backstrom has no redeeming values. He's not even a very good detective. He just takes credit for what other people do, like a showrunner. The one change we made for network TV was to make him very good at his job and take all those bad qualities that he has in the book and turn them into a tool for solving crimes. We hope viewers will watch long enough to realize that what he's saying does not come for a 'bad human being' place. It comes from a bad place in a human being.

If our cases are highly compressed, we compensate in our relationship arcs. We may catch a murderer in forty-four minutes, but it took us six years to have Booth and Brennan consummate their love.

[on why there will only be a limited number of episodes on 'Bones' The dead bodies.) There are a lot of elements in our show that have to be perfect, and dead bodies are one. A big one. The dead bodies have to be made. That's a real skill.