Noah Hawley Quotes

It's always very important to me to try to create a story that feels unpredictable. You can't jump ahead and see what's coming, but at the end, when you've watched the whole thing, it all feels inevitable.

In a book you can really talk about ideas and themes and characters in a deeper way than you can even on the screen.

A two-hour movie tends to be a plot-delivery device; you tend to have to introduce all the characters, say what the goal is, and then get there with a setback, but that's not really how life is or what a story necessarily wants to be.

There's this overly friendly sense of community built up by very isolated people, and there's this Lutheran humbleness that keeps people from talking about their own feelings and asking about yours. What does that do in this modern age where everyone takes pictures of their food, and they share every thought they've ever had in real time?

Let's not forget how beautiful simply washing dishes can be.

It's amazing how flexible the human mind is in terms of jumping into a backstory or an aside. Vonnegut is a great example - it's not a linear story by any means, but somehow your brain is keeping it moving in one direction even though the story is taking you in all these different directions.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've been married once and he left and I don't want to feel this way anymore. Like I can't be vulnerable. Can't relax. It's exhausting, always being on the defensive, keeping my guard up. I feel like Cuba.

There's still nothing like a book to really make you feel like you've disappeared into a world.

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination, the words are turning into pictures in your mind, there's an active relationship that's going on.

Half of a broadcast show, in my experience, is things happening, and the other half is people talking about how they feel about the things that happened. And so there's this sense of everyone saying their subtext out loud.

There's only one note you ever get in broadcast and that's clarity.

If I have to write on an airplane or get up early to write or write late, you just gotta sit down. When you have the time, you have to be able to do it.

Some roads you shouldn't go down. Because maps used to say there were dragons here. Now they don't. But that don't mean the dragons aren't there.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.

It's good to be unexpected with it.

My feeling has always been if you entertain people, they give you permission to do more on a thematic or character level.

In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, "Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 p.m.?" So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.