Noah Hawley Quotes

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I'm not sitting around thinking of ideas for TV shows.

I love bouncing my words off of someone else's, and the fact that writing a story with someone else guarantees you'll get something you never, ever would have written on your own.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

I love discussing the ins and outs of the collaborative nature of writing.

When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.

I believe in collaboration. I think that is the most entertaining and effective way to write for me, personally.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

If I'm stuck in the midst of a story, I take a nap. It often works, and if it doesn't, I still feel better.

I am very happy to be working with so many talented directors and writers, who are penning scripts that are interesting for me.

I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

People sort of imagine Chris Morris and me sitting somewhere dark, with dripping taps and chilling background music. In fact, we like to sit on his roof in the sunshine - and there's an endless amount of just sitting there, going, 'So, erm, er, what shall we do?'

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I keep drawing inspiration from people every day. All of a sudden, something strikes me so hard and dramatically, and then a dream comes - I sit down, cut it off and make a script out of it.

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

I like all kinds of stories, and I usually work on several stories at once. When I run out of gas on one, I start work on the other.

Brainstorming, for me, takes place in my bed at night between the time I turn out my lights and I finally fall asleep. It is not a very violent storm, but what's happening is I am just thinking about different ideas and maybe things I've seen that day that I think might make a good story.

I have a producing partner named Stephen Hamel, and we've been trying to generate material.