Noah Hawley Quotes

Staring up at me, hearing my tired voice, he reached out his tiny hand. He knew me, even though he had never seen me before. And I knew him. He was the love I'd been trying to express my whole life.

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

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.

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.

I remain a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan.

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.'

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.

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.

Life can paralyze us, freeze us into statues if we think about things too long.

I'm sorry," I said, "did you just say elections are about hope?

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.

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?

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.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world - sights, sounds, smells - into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.

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.

But then isn't that what marriage is, two people fighting for land rights to the same six inches?

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.

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.

Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.

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

Life is made of these moments - of one's physical being moving through time and space - and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.

Everyone has their path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You

It's good to be unexpected with it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

'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.

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

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.

You stay home and raise daughters, who grow up and get jobs and then feel pity for you, their stay-at-home mothers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

He swam backward through time, lap after lap, until he was six years old and watching Jack LaLanne tow a thousand-pound boat through San Francisco Bay, until that feeling returned -- that deep boy certainty:
Anything is possible.
Everything is gettable.
You just have to want it badly enough.
Scott wasn't old, it turned out. He wasn't finished. He had just given up.

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.

Anyone looking back at the log later, trying to piece together a mystery, would find nothing but times and dry entries. It was a lazy Sunday. What made it meaningful were not the facts or details, but the imperceptibles. Inner life. The smell of the beach grass and the feel of sand on a bathroom floor when changing out of a swimsuit. The heat of American summer. Line ten of the log read simply: 10:22 Condor ate second breakfast. It couldn't capture the perfect toasting of the onion bagel or the saltiness of the fish in contrast with the thickness of cream cheese. It was time lost in a book - a journey of imagination, transportation - which to others simply looks like sitting or lying stomach-down on the rug in front of a summertime fire, legs bent at the knees, up ninety degrees, kicking absently, feet languid in the air.

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

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.

'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.

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.

If there are any limits to what can be done. The limit is right here (in your head). You've got to get physically fit between your ears. Muscles don't know anything. They have to be thought.

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

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?

In this way he used her as the North Star on a journey where you always want to go south. It was helpful, aligning himself in this way. It gave him something to tune to, like a violin to a piano.

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.

It's hard to be sad when you're being useful.

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.

Everybody acts like the future is so far away, when really every moment that passes is the future.

Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye - an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It's not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.

What's a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn't have a knife behind his back.

A sunrise, a winter squall, birds flying in a perfect V. These were things that were. The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not. Majesty and beauty, these were qualities we projected upon it. A storm was just weather. A sunrise was simply a celestial pattern. It's not that he didn't enjoy them. It's that he didn't require anything more from the universe than that it exist, that it behave consistently-- that gravity worked the way it always worked, that lift and drag were constants.

You have kids and you think I made you, so we're the same, but it's not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.

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.

In the absence of facts ... we tell ourselves stories.

This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm. He

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.

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.

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.

There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.

As his wife she was irrevocably tied to him - his opinions were her opinions. They reflected poorly on her, perhaps not because she held them exactly, but because by choosing Ben, by sticking with him, she showed herself (in the eyes of others) to be a poor judge of character. Though

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

Never fight tomorrow's fight today,

Everyone has their own path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we'll go and the people we'll meet would be pointless.

Of the true mysteries of the universe . . . the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction--Who ARE you, and why are you different from me?--from a NYT Book Review review of Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane

The day I sobered up, I stopped talking," he says. "What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes - I don't know - optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what's the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?" "There's a name for that," she says. "It's called depression.

Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

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?