Hawley Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most interesting ideas definitely come at night. — Richard Hawley

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

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

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 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

'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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pamphlets on Sabbath writing are in request here I have been applied to for them by several of the old Methodists knowing that I had them to sell before. — John Hawley

I wish I had it in my power to furnish you with accommodation I should feel proud to do it, shall be happy to hear from you at anytime when you engagements will allow you an hour and remain with best wishes for yourself, family and circuit. — John 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

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

The Hawley Book of the Dead had me completely spellbound from beginning to end. A storytelling virtuosa, Chrysler Szarlan has woven a wondrous, scintillating web of suspense, love, history, and magic that will keep you eagerly turning the pages late into the night. Even readers not normally drawn to the supernatural will be swept away by this book; it has everything a great adventure should have-and so much more. — Anne Fortier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invariably, guitar players that go solo make really bad records. — Richard Hawley

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

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

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

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

Never fight tomorrow's fight today, — 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

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

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

My favourite thing in the world, apart from my wife and kids, is writing songs. Ever since I was a kid. — Richard 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

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

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

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? — Noah Hawley

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

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

We have to be thankful considering our number as a family we enjoy very good health generally but you may be sure me and my partner have quite enough to exercise our minds and occupy our attention. — John Hawley

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

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

This is not a tragedy. I am used up. — Richard A. Hawley

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

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

I am disposed to be thus particular from the interest you take in our welfare and from the entire confidence I have in your knowing, that you will be sympathetic with us in our misfortunes. — John Hawley

I desire an special interest in your prayers that my faith fail not in the day of adversity. — John 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

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

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

It broke my heart when my first band split up. I was 25 and we'd been together since we were 15. But it had to happen. There was a point when I knew I had to move on. — Richard Hawley

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

Then a soft air, a simple melody, rose to the ears of the suddenly hushed court; and for me, it was May Day again, and I was no longer cold, for the sun burned bright and the grass smelled of its sour-sweet bruisings and an old man fashioned a ballad for the Nut-Brown maid, who would ever be true to her lover. I leaned towards the brightness and, in an abandonment of joy and because there was none to see, tore off my henin and let my nut-brown hair fall to my knees. For I would be a child again, for five minutes, and remember the time when men stopped to gaze at me, with my chaplet of flowers crowning that at which they all marvelled, and longed to touch and stroke and possess. — Rosemary Hawley Jarman

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

When the fair gold morning of April stirred Mary Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little fingers pulling a frog mouth at her. — John Steinbeck

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

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

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

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

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 — Noah Hawley

But in the same way a man's nose and ears become exaggerated as he ages, so do the psychological issues that define him. We — 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

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

until the moon had waxed fat and thinned, and again grown heavy with the child of night, — Rosemary Hawley Jarman

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

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

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

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

the trustworthy person is brave enough to say 'no' to commitments she won't be able to fulfil. — Katherine Hawley