Quotes from Noah Hawley

In 'The X-Men' world, one can be a hero one day and a villain the next, which means there's a constant battle for a character's soul that's dynamic. I find that really fascinating.

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.

There's a degree to which music bypasses our rational brain and accesses our emotional core in a way that's really visceral and allows you to make a strong impression on people without necessary delivering information.

Everyone has their own path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we'll go and the people we'll meet would be pointless.

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.

Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough

It's hard to be sad when you're being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've been married once and he left and I don't want to feel this way anymore. Like I can't be vulnerable. Can't relax. It's exhausting, always being on the defensive, keeping my guard up. I feel like Cuba.

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?

Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.

people can say all kinds of things without ever opening their mouths...

But then isn't that what marriage is, two people fighting for land rights to the same six inches?

At last count there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you're not paying attention.

David is in the entertainment business, which is what people in his line of work call television news these days. A Roman circus of information and opinions.

Staring up at me, hearing my tired voice, he reached out his tiny hand. He knew me, even though he had never seen me before. And I knew him. He was the love I'd been trying to express my whole life.

Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

If there are any limits to what can be done. The limit is right here (in your head). You've got to get physically fit between your ears. Muscles don't know anything. They have to be thought.

True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day a thing we take for granted as normal, a child's bedroom and transform it into something sinister untrustworthy is to undermine the very fabric of life.

The day I sobered up, I stopped talking," he says. "What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes—I don't know—optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what's the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?" "There's a name for that," she says. "It's called depression.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.

But you grew out of it." "Grew? No. I burned it all down, drank myself into a stupor, pissed off everyone I knew." They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.