Noah Hawley Quotes

I remember watching episodes of 'The Sopranos' and being filled with dread knowing what was coming or anticipating what was coming. I don't think that that's always a bad thing. I think sometimes the audience needs a little catharsis held away from them.

I really think if you take away a character's obstacles then there's no comedy.

Show me a novel that's not comic, and I'll show you a novel that's not doing its job.

As comedy presents the vital rhythm of self-preservation, tragedy exhibits that of self-consummation.

Comedy defends the commonplace; tragedy explodes it.

There's an energy that comes through the release of tension that is laughter.

The only difference between comedy and drama is that, in comedy, I'm going to utilize the tool of creating laughter to deflect discomfort and, in drama, I won't use a tool, but we're going to actually deal with the discomfort and see what comes out of it.

Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety.

We like drama. Even in our comedy, we like drama.

The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.

The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don't know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense - but if you don't know that there's a bomb and it just blows up, then it's just a surprise.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

Drama can feel like therapy whereas comedy feels like there's been a pressure and a weight lifted off of you. You come to work and you laugh all day, you go home and you feel light and there's a certain feeling when you're sitting with the audience and they leave after 90 minutes and it's just pure escapism and they're happy.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

If you look at 'The Best Man,' there's a lot of humor in that, but I never consider that movie a comedy. I felt that it was a drama with comedic elements and comedic parts to it.

Tragedy without comedy is melodrama, and comedy without a higher purpose is vacant.

There's timing in drama. You have to have a sense of rhythm. But the real thing that lends yourself to drama as opposed to comedy is a sense from the audience of whether there's more to it than you can see.

Comedy's my outlet for my ridiculous emotions.

At the heart of any drama, there's conflict. When you are acting, you get to play out the confrontations you want to have in real life but can't. Or the emotions that you would want to have in real life, but sometimes they are too difficult.

I often find in doing tragedy, or doing very serious material, that there's a level of anxiety that builds that often leads to laughter in some cases. In between takes, there can often be a lightness.

Building and sustaining tension is always my priority, so home entertainment provides challenges to that.

I've always felt that there's a lot of similarity between doing a comedy and doing a scary movie because jokes and scares are all about timing. If you give the punch line too early or too late, the joke falls flat. And it's the same with a scare.

There's a lot of similarities, I think, between a thriller and a comedy because it's all about tension. It's about building tension and setups and payoffs and misdirections and surprising people and sort of pushing the boundary.

I'm inspired by making people laugh at subjects that should make them cry.