Top 66 Noah Hawley Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Noah Hawley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Greatness and fiasco is the same. You're reaching for s

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 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
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
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
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
‘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
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
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
There’s the craft of acting, and then there’s a quality. There’s a quality that someone has.
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
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
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
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
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
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
The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood.
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
Bringing back stamp collecting and bringing back bridge seems like a pretty good way to fight the modern world.
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
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
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
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
People, they don’t know how to bend; they just break.
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
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
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
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
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
‘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
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
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit dow

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
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
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
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
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
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
I remain a huge ‘Game of Thrones’ fan.
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
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
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 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
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
I’m a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.
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
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
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
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
You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries.
Noah Hawley