168 Quotes by Noah Hawley

A novel is a relationship, you know? When you read a book, the writer has done half the work, and you're doing half the work. You're providing the imagination; the words are turning into pictures in your mind. There's an active relationship that's going on.

My goal is always to make something unpredictable that feels inevitable in the end. It's getting harder to do that. Audiences are so sophisticated and so smart.

You've got to give an audience something to root for. The minute you get into more dystopian shows, where everything's really dark, and no one has any hope, and there's no positive goal we're working toward, it's a bummer. You run out of gas with them. Because you need to know, 'What am I in this for? What am I rooting for?'

The most dangerous thing, when you have a serious mental illness, is convincing yourself that you don't have it. And you see it all the time. People get on medication, and they feel better, and they stop taking it. And some flirt with unreality on some levels. But it feels so convincing to them that it feels real.

What success has done is present me with a lot of opportunities, and I haven't necessarily learned to say 'no' as well as I should have.

If there's one thing that television doesn't really do, and has never really done, is to tell a surreal story.

I think this idea of fighting the enemy within is sort of more interesting than fighting an external enemy.

A book is full of ideas. You just live with what you read for so much longer. A lot of the times, nowadays, with a movie or TV show, it's like, 'Oh, it's entertainment!' And you never think about it again.

I would have loved to have been in the room with the ABC executives when they watched David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' TV pilot. You know that had to be a long silence after that thing stopped.