Noah Baumbach Quotes

I love meeting booksellers and readers and hearing how they've read and received my stories. Often I'm surprised by which characters they've loved best, what scenes have stayed with them, what connections they've felt between my characters' lives and theirs.

In this mob of I's inside, which one is me? Hear me out. I know I'm wandering, but don't start putting a lid on this racket. No telling what I'll do then. Every moment I'm thrown by your story. One moment it's happy, and I'm singing. One moment it's sad, and I'm weeping. It turns bitter, and I pull away. But then you spill a little grace, and just like that, I'm all light. It's not so bad, this arrangement, actually.

There's this art form in songwriting that's incredibly difficult - to be really funny in a song and also really touching. I can't do that.

As long as it's not an easy, outdated stereotype and it comes from an interesting or emotionally driven place, then anyone can be made fun of.

Personal stories are the emotional glue that connects your audience to your message.

To me, as a director and an actor, that's the main thing. "What's the heart of this story? What's the humanity of this story? And if the movie doesn't have it, then why am I watching it?" Even if it's a silly comedy, like Superbad or Knocked Up - Judd Apatow, I love, because he's all about heart. The humor comes out of the humanity.

You start to find a rhythm and usually if it makes me laugh or comment in the editing room then I knew that's what's going to happen in the audience. That first reaction is usually the right reaction.

I am an old-fashioned storyteller. I try to make people laugh and cry. A fiction writer's duty is to entertain. If you can sneak in something profound or symbolic, so much the better.

Great stories move through fear.

'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

That's how a good story works. It changes how you feel. It brings you to a greater appreciation, a greater joy, of your own existence.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.

It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.

Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

I was just infused with ideas and I would dream about it and wake up and go, "Oh, I have another idea about Walter White." It was so well written. And it just got into my soul.

Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.

Levity, you need levity to feel anything. You need to laugh before you cry. I think films that take themselves too seriously without any levity are missing an important ingredient to the potential emotional impact of their stories.

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them ok, be sad now. Humor, you can add. Even to the last minute you can be adding little bits of humor. But the true earned emotion is something that you really have to craft.

I think if there hadn't been the one passage of the book that mostly abandons the humor, and focuses very intently on one person's struggle with cancer, it wouldn't have been a critical success. So that was a very deliberate decision, to say "Well, if you think it's all fun and games, it's not." So that was my approach: We're going to have as much fun as I can possibly provide, but the serious things that might normally pass by you are not going to be lost.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.

Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have. And when you can make someone laugh and cry, alternatively, as Chaplin does - now that's the highest of all personal achievements. I don't know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal.