Noah Hawley Quotes

If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.

- Noah Hawley

Greatness and fiasco is the same. You're reaching for something just out of your grasp, and if you get it, it's great, and if you don't, it's a disaster.

- Noah Hawley

I'm attracted to ensembles: you get a lot of really good moving pieces. It's sort of like a horse race in a way, especially when you know that everyone is on this collision course. It's like, 'Who's going to make it?' And you can put people together in unexpected pairings.

- Noah Hawley

I'm on a lot of airplanes. There are definitely times when I just vapor-lock. I'm on the plane, and I have so much to do, I just don't know what to do. It never lasts for very long. It might last for the flight.

- Noah Hawley

The job at broadcast is to figure out what the dumbest person in the room is going to think. That's not the case at FX.

- Noah Hawley

I pitched the idea to FX that there's this larger 'Fargo' universe where there's true crime in the upper Midwest, and I can tell stories from any era of that. Maybe they connect to the first season or the movie, or maybe they don't. It's just a style of storytelling. We're under the auspices of being a true story that isn't true.

- Noah Hawley

What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true.

- Noah Hawley

The most dangerous thing, when you have a serious mental illness, is convincing yourself that you don't have it. And you see it all the time. People get on medication, and they feel better, and they stop taking it. And some flirt with unreality on some levels. But it feels so convincing to them that it feels real.

- Noah Hawley

When I sold my first book, 'A Conspiracy of Tall Men,' it was part of a two-book deal. It wasn't hugely lucrative, but it was enough money for me to quit the paralegal job I had in San Francisco.

- Noah Hawley

I think people used to read 'War and Peace,' and now they don't; now they sit around with their tablets and watch 'Downton Abbey' and 'Breaking Bad' or whatever, and they want the things that they watch to be better so that they can feel better about themselves for watching it.

- Noah Hawley

'Downton Abbey' didn't have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn't just as an entertainment.

- Noah Hawley

I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'

- Noah Hawley

I love the idea that the editing room is the final time you write. You should still be creatively solving problems even at that point. It's not really until you're locked that you can call it quits.

- Noah Hawley

Let me be clear. 'The Good Father' isn't a handbook on how to assassinate the president.

- Noah Hawley

My mom never went to college, so she just assumed the writer identity, and that was always really inspiring to me. It's not something you need nine levels of education for. It's really an identity that you claim for yourself, and then you have to make yourself one.

- Noah Hawley

I think this idea of fighting the enemy within is sort of more interesting than fighting an external enemy.

- Noah Hawley

There's a sense you get from the Coens' work, like 'No Country for Old Men,' where you put these characters in situations, and you just let this painful amount of time take place. Part of the tension is just how long it takes to get out of that scene.

- Noah Hawley

There is a difference between movie actors and TV acting, especially with movie stars, which is they know their face is 20 feet high on the screen. They know they don't have to do much.

- Noah Hawley

I always feel like you can take a genre that has a familiar structure to it and then reinvent it as a character piece. Suddenly, what's old is new again. With 'Fargo,' I adapted a movie without any of the characters or the story. Yet somehow it feels like 'Fargo.'

- Noah Hawley

There's this common sense idea that in order to appeal to the biggest number of people, you have to write something very general, but my experience is the more specific you make something, the more people respond to it, in a very odd way.

- Noah Hawley

It used to be for writers that that six seasons and a movie thing, that's the holy grail as writers - your series goes eight, 10 seasons, you're set for life.

- Noah Hawley

The '50s and the '70s are sort of similar in that they're both times of major paranoia in America.

- Noah Hawley

One of the things I've always loved about genre, comic books, science fiction and fantasy is that there's a certain level of playfulness to them, and pure imagination and creativity.

- Noah Hawley

In 'The X-Men' world, one can be a hero one day and a villain the next, which means there's a constant battle for a character's soul that's dynamic. I find that really fascinating.

- Noah Hawley

The 'X-Men' stories are the stories of outsiders: people who don't fit into normal society and are ostracised; it's a metaphor for gender, race, or sexual orientation.

- Noah Hawley

One of the things that I've always appreciated about the 'X-Men' style of storytelling versus other Marvel stories is how fluid the line between good and bad and right and wrong is.

- Noah Hawley

When Fox asked me if I'd consider taking on The X-Men universe for television, my first thought was, 'What would you do with those stories or that genre that hasn't been done?'

- Noah Hawley

For some reason, I tend to take on the stuff that people are really passionate about. If you make a list of people you don't want to offend, it's Vonnegut readers, comic book fans, and Coen brothers enthusiasts.

- Noah Hawley

The great thing about 'Fargo' is that it's a more objective style of filmmaking: the camera moves in very classical ways, and the most interesting things normally are the characters.

- Noah Hawley

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

- Noah Hawley

I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.

- Noah Hawley

I drove around New York when we did the upfronts and when we premiered 'Fargo,' and they crocheted a sweater for a double-decker bus and drove it around.

- Noah Hawley

I did some feature work, then tried TV. I was always very aware that the only power that you have is the power of options. If the film industry dries up, then you focus on the TV or the books. For me, it was always about what story do I want to tell next?

- Noah Hawley

The great amount of fun that I have is I can cast dramatic actors to play comedic roles, and I can cast comedic actors to play dramatic roles because, really, there's no such thing. There's just actors.

- Noah Hawley

Obviously, when you do something with drama and comedy in it - and by that, I mean a scene that has drama and comedy in it - you know the minute you introduce music, you're either scoring the drama or you're scoring the comedy, and therefore the scene becomes either dramatic or comedic.

- Noah Hawley

'Fargo' is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that's what makes it tragic. It's about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same.

- Noah Hawley

In a traditional TV show or movie, your hero is always where the action is. But in real life, at the end of the movie 'Fargo,' when Bill Macy is arrested, Marge is nowhere to be found because it's a different jurisdiction, and she wouldn't be there. I took that to heart.

- Noah Hawley

The first dumb idea was to do it at all - to take 'Fargo,' this beloved classic, and turn it into a television show. The second dumb idea, when you do it and it works, was to throw everything out and start again.

- Noah Hawley

Making 'Fargo' for FX has been the highlight of my career. A writer can search his or her whole career for a network partner who truly understands and encourages their vision. For me, the search is over.

- Noah Hawley

There is the moral spectrum in 'Fargo,' and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other.

- Noah Hawley

I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.

- Noah Hawley

The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, 'This is also 'Fargo,' you know what I mean?

- Noah Hawley

'Fargo' becomes a metaphor for a type of true crime case where truth is stranger than fiction. So, there's no reason that there isn't another 10-hour true crime story that could be told in this region.

- Noah Hawley

When I took on 'Fargo,' I thought, 'Well, this is just a terrible idea. Four people will watch it, and they'll hate-watch.' But that allowed me to just go for it and take the risks.

- Noah Hawley

The first conversations I had for 'Legion' were right as the first year of 'Fargo' was ending. 'Daredevil' hadn't even begun then, so when signing on, I had no real sense of the onslaught that was coming.

- Noah Hawley

When you're a writer on a show, your job is to write in the show runner's voice, really.

- Noah Hawley

The thing with making your art your business is: It's a business. You can't sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you're in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, 'OK. I can write from 4 to 6.' So you write.

- Noah Hawley

Making a new season for 'Legion' is not something you just switch into. It's not something you do between dropping the kids off in the morning and having dinner at night. That's a retreat into the woods for six weeks with some mushrooms, and trying to come back with the answers.

- Noah Hawley

The danger of writing a so-called thriller is that in your last 100 pages, all of these really interesting characters you've created are just running away from something or toward something, but they're no longer capable of innovation or discovery.

- Noah Hawley

'Legion' is meant to be a show that is a state of mind. But the problem with TV is that there are commercials. There's a hypnotic quality to the way we put it together. I need to get you out of your life in the first seven minutes of that show.

- Noah Hawley

We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.

- Noah Hawley

The thing that scares us the most is when familiar things operate in unfamiliar ways.

- Noah Hawley

It's a human desire to be scared. On some level, that's how we survived - that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it's just, 'What are you doing? Don't go in the basement!'

- Noah Hawley

TV is all about learning to write in someone else's voice, so if you do it long enough without selling your own project, they assume you don't have your own voice; you're just a good mimic.

- Noah Hawley

I'm not that guy who thinks I have all the answers. Writing is a means of communicating, and if enough people say, 'I don't get it,' it's worth looking at.

- Noah Hawley

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

- Noah Hawley

The anthology format is completely normal to me. That's just how TV works in my experience.

- Noah Hawley

The great thing about an anthology is that each year is its own 10-hour movie, and the only requirement is that it's the best 10-hour movie that I can make out of the story.

- Noah Hawley

My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It's getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart.

- Noah Hawley

You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries.

- Noah Hawley

I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance.

- Noah Hawley

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.

- Noah Hawley

As for my schedule, I tend to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning, and I try to be as productive as possible. Some days, I can devote to one specific thing. Other days, it's a catch-all day.

- Noah Hawley

The prospect of being a father made me ask myself a question. How do you know what kind of adult your child will turn out to be? And how much can you control that?

- Noah Hawley

Bringing back stamp collecting and bringing back bridge seems like a pretty good way to fight the modern world.

- Noah Hawley

My feeling is there's a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that.

- Noah Hawley

I was part of a writers' collective with 21 writers and filmmakers called the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. We had our own office space in this old converted dog and cat hospital, and we had a basketball hoop outside. I'd bring my dog to work every day and write.

- Noah Hawley

One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with.

- Noah Hawley

Everyone always says that conflict is drama, and I agree, but I also don't think you need drama everywhere. Or conflict everywhere.

- Noah Hawley

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.

- Noah Hawley

There's a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that's really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information.

- Noah Hawley

I think for really good-hearted people, that idea of putting yourself in the shoes of a monster to figure out why they acted that way, that's a really frightening idea.

- Noah Hawley

What makes something tragic is that it could've been averted at multiple points.

- Noah Hawley

I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.

- Noah Hawley

Writing is this odd act, right? To sit and type, or write by hand, or whatever people do. And it requires a real discipline because it is really a sheer act of will that you're creating something, and you're doing it by yourself.

- Noah Hawley

I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over.

- Noah Hawley

I am a salesman, I am an executive, I look at budgets, I think about power politics, but then I am also a creative person.

- Noah Hawley

I remain a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan.

- Noah Hawley

I think the age of the modern media campaign has created a new icon, the celebrity-in-chief. Political elections have become wars fought by candidates with opposing values.

- Noah Hawley

I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion.

- Noah Hawley

Anytime you want to create something different, you have to convince people that it's O.K. 'We'll be O.K. It's going to work out. It's going to be great.'

- Noah Hawley

I don't think we have to suffer personally to make great art. If you're prepared and organized, and you know what you're looking for, you can make great art and then go home.

- Noah Hawley

Experimental film by the '70s had become much more mainstream after 'Bonnie and Clyde' and stuff in the late '60s, when you were seeing bigger movies where people were exploring the medium a lot more.

- Noah Hawley

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

- Noah Hawley

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.

- Noah Hawley

You've got to give an audience something to root for. The minute you get into more dystopian shows, where everything's really dark, and no one has any hope, and there's no positive goal we're working toward, it's a bummer. You run out of gas with them. Because you need to know, 'What am I in this for? What am I rooting for?'

- Noah Hawley

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.

- Noah Hawley

I'm Kubrick without the O.C.D.

- Noah Hawley

I would have loved to have been in the room with the ABC executives when they watched David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' TV pilot. You know that had to be a long silence after that thing stopped.

- Noah Hawley

People, they don't know how to bend; they just break.

- Noah Hawley

The great thing about making an ensemble show is it becomes modular. It might work on the page to cut from one scene to another, but on the screen, it's more powerful to take that second scene and move it first or move it later.

- Noah Hawley

What success has done is present me with a lot of opportunities, and I haven't necessarily learned to say 'no' as well as I should have.

- Noah Hawley

America is a huge country, filled with great tracts of open land. If you're not careful, you can get lost in it - lost emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

- Noah Hawley

I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie 'Lies & Alibis' with Steve Coogan.

- Noah Hawley

Tension is all about, 'Why is this taking so long?' The interesting thing about that is that it's also the tension of comedy. The tension of drama and comedy is similar, and that's why usually you can get a big laugh in a really tense moment because people need that release.

- Noah Hawley

I guess I still have this motto: 'What else can I get away with?' And unpredictability in film - that's the hardest thing there is.

- Noah Hawley

As a storyteller, you have the story that you tell, and you have the way you can tell it, and both are equally important.

- Noah Hawley

A book is full of ideas. You just live with what you read for so much longer. A lot of the times, nowadays, with a movie or TV show, it's like, 'Oh, it's entertainment!' And you never think about it again.

- Noah Hawley

There's the craft of acting, and then there's a quality. There's a quality that someone has.

- Noah Hawley

The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood.

- Noah Hawley

There are things we can control and the things we can't control. I can't control how people react to the work I do.

- Noah Hawley