Top 61 Noir Fiction Quotes
#1. Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary.
Jeff Goldblum
#2. Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist?
From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin
Russell C. Brennan
#4. The hotel was guest-friendly with hourly rates and had enough room to swing a cat, if it were a small cat and you wanted to swing it.
James A. Newman
#5. A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
Raymond Chandler
#6. Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.
Adrian McKinty
#8. His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.
Cornell Woolrich
#9. My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear ("Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!") signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there'd be real hell to pay.
Ed Lynskey
#11. You ever choke a man out with his own shirt?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"A yes or no one.
Todd Morr
#12. That was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.
Lily Gardner
#13. The only thing that ever leaves this place is that muddy water in the Rappahannock.
Randolph Randy Camp
#14. He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.
Andrew Vachss
#15. How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies?
Todd Morr
#16. The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord's name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading.
Andrew Cotto
#17. His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like God.
("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
#18. Freedom breeds uncertainty; uncertainty invites chaos.
R.J. Leahy
#19. There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.
Lily Gardner
#20. A diamond wedding ring, you say?"
I studied his face. Was he putting me on? He looked earnest. "As any guy would expect, a diamond is what she's after," I said. "Did you hold out hope you'd get by for anything less?
Ed Lynskey
#21. Anything that has to do with noir and space, I'm gonna love. When you've got a noir-ish, pulpy detective in a science fiction show, I'm all in, in that regard.
Thomas Jane
#22. Steve needed to be careful here. He'd read mid-twentieth-century science fiction so he knew that once you started switching realities you ran into problems with nested levels of existence.
Danyl McLauchlan
#24. About Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.
Lily Gardner
#25. I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.
Cornell Woolrich
#26. May they run free forever and grow back their limbs!
Henry Mosquera
#27. Quote taken from Chapter 1:
That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham.
Ed Lynskey
#28. From Chapter 1:
"You're not a local." I paused, unsure. "Or are you?"
"Sort of. Randall Van Dotson is my dad. I'm Rennie."
After tossing her head that coy, sweet way girls do, she gave me a candid appraisal.
Ed Lynskey
#29. He told himself she wasn't really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.
David Goodis
#31. The law enforcement in this town is terrific. All through prohibition Eddie Mars' place was a night club and they had two uniformed men in the lobby every night-to see that the guests didn't bring their own liquor instead of buying it from the house.
Raymond Chandler
#32. Evans made himself their spokesman. "Charlie and Joe," he offered. "Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time." Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made.
Cornell Woolrich
#33. This is the Rock, sweetheart," the owner added. "There's no tragedy you can't profit from.
Henry Mosquera
#34. The digital sunset always looks better than the real thing, always. Because a sunset generated by the basic package of yellow sun and blue sky is unreliable. Today it may be stunning, hypnotic. Tomorrow it may be lifeless and dull, a white sky scorched with yellow. Tomorrow the sky will be velvet.
Will Christopher Baer
#35. You're a crime fiction writer if...The injustices of this world boil your blood. You become a fucking supernova. So you write.
Verge Le Noir
#36. She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.
Richard Stark
#37. The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.
Henry Mosquera
#38. Foreign food isn't really my thing. I tasted whale once, and I was sick for a week.
Steen Langstrup
#39. Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?"
I felt it. I took it easy.
Ross Macdonald
#40. There are criminals everywhere these days, you know. One might end up missing the police! Who would have thought that possible?
The Maid
The Informer by Steen Langtrup
Steen Langstrup
#41. Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that.
Ed Lynskey
#42. I rode a streetcar to the edge of the city limits, then I started to walk, swinging the old thumb whenever I saw a car coming.
Jim Thompson
#43. Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face.
Randolph Randy Camp
#44. Call me Dudley. We're of equal rank. I'm older, but you're far better looking. I can tell we're going to be grand partners.
James Ellroy
#45. The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.
Lily Gardner
#46. But what the hell, I thought as I lay there in the dark. It could be souls rot away with the body, too. What did anything matter in the long run anyway, except memories? And they only lived on in corpses that couldn't talk.
Will Viharo
#47. I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.
Sara Sheridan
#48. In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball.
Ed Lynskey
#49. I have saved no one but myself and now I watch for the other universe to unravel in my skull, for the sky to become my own skin and fill with stars.
Will Christopher Baer
#50. That crap about doing something with your life are luxury problems. People like us have to play by a different rules.
#ShadowofSadd #Books
Steen Langstrup
#51. I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.
Walter Mosley
#52. Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing.
Barry Graham
#53. How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939?
I remember.
I should remember.
I started it.
My name is Robert Leroy Parker.
Daniel DeLacy
#54. There were three of them in the room now, where only two had first come in. Death was in the room with the two of them.
Cornell Woolrich
#55. We saved the lives of a whole family that night. Children, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, all sailed to safety in Sweden inside a little fisherman's boat."
Johannes aka 'BB'
The Informer by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
#57. She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.
Megan Abbott
#60. I've got to think of a hundred and sixty million Americans, not of the three or four that happen to be the ones I love. And it wouldn't be a big thing - security is built on lots of little thing. I don't like to talk about it. (Calhoun Hightower in Danger for Breakfast)
John McPartland
#61. After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber.
Brian Azzarello
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