Noah Hawley Quotes

I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I'm interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for - trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn't normally appeal to.

Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.

You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way.

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,'_ 'tender' or 'universal.' But to the real question of what's inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that.

The thought of making a movie in which the monsters were the good guys was just financial suicide.

It is extremely difficult to do anything constructive, let alone deep, on daily commercial television, especially on a talk show.

I love the supernatural in storytelling. The Twilight Zone was a huge influence on me, in terms of writing and storytelling, where you're not restricted to the parameters of reality to tell your tale.

I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

More and more of our finest actors are finding room for themselves in the world of television - but I truly believe it's because some of the best stories are being told there.

Obviously, television is a writer's medium, so you get a lot more power and authority. With a film, the discipline is having a beginning, middle and end, and having it work in a specific space of time.

What's amazing about doing movies, compared to television, there's an ending you can see. There's an enthusiasm to it.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

I would definitely not rule out doing television in the future because I think it's a great medium for telling stories. And it can also be practically very nice for a family man to have 9 months out of the year where you're in the city, where you're close to your home.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.

Television is what we call the long form of storytelling, where we tell stories over thirteen, twenty-two, or twenty-four hours. Miniseries is an eight-hour form of storytelling, and film is a two-hour form. Each and every one of them are important to me, because they're a different modality of storytelling.

Television is what we're all very attracted to because that's where the best writing and the best characters are.

I think that television has become really, really interesting, in terms of character development. You can have 13 hours to develop a character, as opposed to 25 minutes in a movie. That excites me.

TV is very much my first love. I love this world. It's where writers have the most creative control, and I just love that.

One thing I really want to explore is writing.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

I'm living in Los Angeles, I'm in films and I'm on television, and I'm working with actors and telling stories. I'm living the fantasy. My worst day is a great day.

There is much to admire in Peter Brett's writing, and his concept is brilliant. There's action and suspense all the way.

I love making movies, I love the differentness of it, I love writing. But I've always liked television. I grew up on television.