Famous Quotes & Sayings

Noah Hawley Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Noah Hawley.

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Famous Quotes By Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire's account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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

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'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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough — Noah Hawley

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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? — Noah Hawley

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

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Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough. — Noah Hawley

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It's good to be unexpected with it. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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There is no separating yourself from the things you make, he thought. If you are a cesspool, what else can your work be except shit? — Noah Hawley

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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

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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 — Noah Hawley

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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

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

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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

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

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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 — Noah Hawley

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...people can say all kinds of things without ever opening their mouths... — Noah Hawley

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

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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

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

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured. — Noah Hawley

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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He worried that he was destined to be a hobbyist, a dreamer incapable of finishing anything. The fact that the college seemed to encourage this kind of "experimentation" made him doubt its motives as an institution of higher learning. — Noah Hawley

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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

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

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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

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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 — Noah Hawley

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I remain a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan. — Noah Hawley

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

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

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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

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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? — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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David is in the entertainment business, which is what people in his line of work call television news these days. A Roman circus of information and opinions. — Noah Hawley

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Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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

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He was a sorting machine, boxing the news by category and priority, forwarding tips to various departments. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.
And then it's over. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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

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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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. — Noah Hawley

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Never fight tomorrow's fight today, — Noah Hawley

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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

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In the absence of facts ... we tell ourselves stories. — Noah Hawley

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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

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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

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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

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'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

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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

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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

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Two nights later, she was out with some work friends at a blue-plate hipster joint near the L train when she spotted Doug. He had a heavy beard and wore overalls. She liked his eyes, the way they crinkled when he smiled. When he came up to the bar for another pitcher, she struck up a conversation. He told her he was a writer who avoided writing by hosting elaborate dinner parties. His apartment was full of obscure food prep machinery, vintage pasta rollers and a three-hundred-pound cappuccino machine he'd rebuilt screw by screw. — Noah Hawley

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That swirling devil's clot, that black maelstrom of cylindrical majesty. It is a swirling gray spider egg unspooling, filled with rotten teeth. A biblical monster, God's vengeance. Whirring — Noah Hawley

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He had been young once and limitless, and then somehow his life became a foregone conclusion. An almost was, not even a has been. — Noah Hawley

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

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'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