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" I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven. "

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" For some reason, I tend to take on the stuff that people are really passionate about. If you make a list of people you don't want to offend, it's Vonnegut readers, comic book fans, and Coen brothers enthusiasts. "

Noah Hawley

Book

People

Want

" The prospect of being a father made me ask myself a question. How do you know what kind of adult your child will turn out to be? And how much can you control that? "

" 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?' "

" One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen's movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with. "

" 'Fargo' becomes a metaphor for a type of true crime case where truth is stranger than fiction. So, there's no reason that there isn't another 10-hour true crime story that could be told in this region. "

" I think that we're pattern-seeking animals, and what we like best is a story where everything fits together, where there's no puzzle pieces left over. "

" 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. "

" There's the craft of acting, and then there's a quality. There's a quality that someone has. "

" I did some feature work, then tried TV. I was always very aware that the only power that you have is the power of options. If the film industry dries up, then you focus on the TV or the books. For me, it was always about what story do I want to tell next? "

Noah Hawley

Power

You

" 'Fargo' is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that's what makes it tragic. It's about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same. "

" I remain a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan. "

" In a traditional TV show or movie, your hero is always where the action is. But in real life, at the end of the movie 'Fargo,' when Bill Macy is arrested, Marge is nowhere to be found because it's a different jurisdiction, and she wouldn't be there. I took that to heart. "

" 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. "

" There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting. "

Noah Hawley

Walk

Story

" The last thing you want is to be desperate in Hollywood. "

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

" I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion. "

Noah Hawley

Sickness

Stories

" I think for really good-hearted people, that idea of putting yourself in the shoes of a monster to figure out why they acted that way, that's a really frightening idea. "

" There is a difference between movie actors and TV acting, especially with movie stars, which is they know their face is 20 feet high on the screen. They know they don't have to do much. "

" America is a huge country, filled with great tracts of open land. If you're not careful, you can get lost in it - lost emotionally, mentally, spiritually. "

" The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional. "

" The thing with making your art your business is: It's a business. You can't sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you're in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, 'OK. I can write from 4 to 6.' So you write. "

" The job at broadcast is to figure out what the dumbest person in the room is going to think. That's not the case at FX. "

" There's this common sense idea that in order to appeal to the biggest number of people, you have to write something very general, but my experience is the more specific you make something, the more people respond to it, in a very odd way. "

" It's a human desire to be scared. On some level, that's how we survived - that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it's just, 'What are you doing? Don't go in the basement!' "

" What's great is that each medium has a unique set of things that it does and does well. Film is a visual medium, and obviously, you can't fit a whole book into two hours unless you're really economical about it. Obviously, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and on some level, it's sort of true. "

" 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. "

" Anytime you want to create something different, you have to convince people that it's O.K. 'We'll be O.K. It's going to work out. It's going to be great.' "

" There's a sense you get from the Coens' work, like 'No Country for Old Men,' where you put these characters in situations, and you just let this painful amount of time take place. Part of the tension is just how long it takes to get out of that scene. "

" I think the age of the modern media campaign has created a new icon, the celebrity-in-chief. Political elections have become wars fought by candidates with opposing values. "