Noah Hawley Quotes

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

I've discovered I love the vast landscape a series offers. I tend to write long anyway, so, it turns out, series gives me the perfect vehicle for writing 'large' stories.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

What's so cool about movies is once you're done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you're there for however long you do the show.

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

It's great if a pilot starts off great and if it doesn't start off so great it's not that big a deal: everybody's baby is born ugly. But you want to know, if given the opportunity: Where are we going? What's the story we're trying to tell?

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.