Noah Hawley Quotes

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

the process of a book's coming to life is not fully complete until your imagination meets mine on the page. The words evoke pictures and something altogether new is created, something different from the limits of my own skills and imagination. Something that is a marriage between your heart, mind, and body - and mine.

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

As I read, I start to form clear ideas of the characters and allow myself to be a proper conduit for this author's voice so that you will feel you have been on a seductive audio journey.

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

He just kind of talks them through, and then I get the fun part cause I get to make up the stories.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

A novel is, hopefully, the starting point of a conversation, one in which the author engages readers and asks that they see things from a different point of view than they might otherwise.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

I see the role of the writer as creating a room with big windows and leaving the reader to imagine. It's a meeting on the page.