Quotes About Noir

#1. You and Galileo," I said.
"Didn't he throw his balls off the leaning tower?" Quirk Said.

Robert B. Parker

#2. Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.

Alexander McCall Smith

#3. You and I are black and white - a film noir, filled with gestures, poignant and tender

John Geddes

#4. [She] had a habit of putting things in that way, as though she had accidently set your house on fire and had no choice now but to stand back and watch it burn.

Vu Tran

#5. This is the Rock, sweetheart," the owner added. "There's no tragedy you can't profit from.

Henry Mosquera

#6. Sweetly, albeit hoarsely and with a burr, the girl started singing something scarcely comprehensible, but, judging by the women's faces in the stalls, very seductive:
Guerlain, Chanel no 5, Mitsuko, Narcissus noir, evening dresses, cocktail dresses..

Mikhail Bulgakov

#7. 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

#8. You ever f**k Susan here?" she said, her face almost touching mine.
"I'm impressed," I said. "The question is intrusive, annoying, coarse, and voyeuristic. That's quite a lot to get into a simple question.

Robert B. Parker

#9. Candy nodded absently.
"Okay," she said. "What shall I wear?"
"A gun," I said.

Robert B. Parker

#10. I've been embracing the red lip and just wearing it every day, not just for going out. And I get so many compliments on it. I love the Julie Hewett Rouge Noir: it's sort of a forties red.

Stephanie March

#11. As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.

Steve Erickson

#12. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

Raymond Chandler

#13. It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

Cornell Woolrich

#14. That pistol I gave you is a piece of crap. You can't hit anything with it, not at that distance."
Staring at her with tears in his blinking eyes, he says, "I did."
Conversation between Alis K and Willy
The Informer

Steen Langstrup

#15. In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

Dennis Lehane

#16. 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

#17. She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

Richard Stark

#18. He looked as if he'd got a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance.

Richard Brautigan

#19. It's raining in Washington tonight. Plump, warm summer rain that covers the sidewalks with leopard spots. Downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or Boy Kings. I like that.

Alan Moore

#20. Either you're going to shoot us or you're not. The ball always lands on red or black, never both.

V. Alexander

#21. No viticultural region in America has demonstrated as much progress in quality and potential for greatness as ... the Santa Barbara region, where the Burgundian varietals Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are planted in its cooler climates.

Robert M. Parker Jr.

#22. My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.

Ross Macdonald

#23. Maya, Indian goddess of illusions. Siren of shipwrecked sailors. If only you lactated Pinot Noir, you'd be perfect.

Rex Pickett

#24. You do know I'm not psychic, right?'
Dash looked down at her. 'Joy...you do know that normal people don't see ghosts, right?

Amy Andrews

#25. The only thing altruism will get you here is a boot stomping on your head.

Henry Mosquera

#26. A convoluted noir infused extravaganza clogged with humans but also a bizarre cluster of unique creatures and provocative human chimeras customized via genetic manipulation and body augmentation, a reverie of alluring cultural ferment and cyberdelic imagery making a grand display

Unknown

#27. I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

Claire Denis

#28. One of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a matching band in a world somewhere else.

Michael Connelly

#29. Foreign food isn't really my thing. I tasted whale once, and I was sick for a week.

Steen Langstrup

#30. And I've met a very wonderful woman," I said.

"They're all wonderful," Haller said.
"Well, many of them," I said.
"I love them," Haller said. "The way they talk, how they smell, the way they touch their hair, everything."
"I know," I said.

Robert B. Parker

#31. Shopping is never over," Susan said. "It is merely suspended.

Robert B. Parker

#32. Jack ordered a bottle of pinot noir, and they perused the menu while they chatted. "So you were at Georgetown." Melanie said it as a statement.

Tom Clancy

#33. Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

Otto Penzler

#34. Because I love you," I said. "Because you are in my life like the music at the edge of silence.

Robert B. Parker

#35. There are a few rules in investigations, and one is to never cringe at the person's appearance that you're about to pump for info.

Ruth Bainbridge

#36. 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

#37. Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

James Ellroy

#38. 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

#39. The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.

Jim Thompson

#40. Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for.

Lana Wachowski

#41. Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.

David Goodis

#42. That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style.

Lawrence Kasdan

#43. The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can't live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin' wide in the turns.

Daniel Woodrell

#44. I got into reading a lot of noir and a lot of thrillers as well, and I really admired the plotting about those and the way that they can surprise you. And obviously to surprise people and to have twists in the tale, you have to plan quite carefully.

Joe Abercrombie

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Taking my drink, I moved around the bar to her. Her smile was a little crooked as I sat down. I guessed it had been a wet night for platinum blondes.

Michael McCretton

#48. The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.
Michel de Montaigne

Laurie Stevens

#49. Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face.

Randolph Randy Camp

#50. The noir universe hates do-gooders so it tries to pound them and punish them.

Duane Swierczynski

#51. When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.

Kerry Greenwood

#52. 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

#53. If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."
"Caterpillar blood," I said.

Raymond Chandler

#54. Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective

Dean Cavanagh

#55. Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.

Wesley Morris

#56. Looking round the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught.

Philip Kerr

#57. 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

#58. Jesus Christ," she said. "You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.

Robert B. Parker

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.

Rob Thomas

#62. Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn't that the American dream in a nutshell.

Josh Stallings

#63. Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

Philip Kerr

#64. He was wearing a gleaming cream-coloured linen suit, and a Panama hat. The weirdest thing about this was that he was not the most outlandish-looking person in the room by a long way. Not that Little Miss Dresses-Like-Bogart over here has a right to complain

Alexis Hall

#65. She said to me, "I don't know what life is anymore, it seems mean to me. I always wanted to be a mermaid but I never saw the sea.

Renee Thebeau

#66. It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.

Daniel Woodrell

#67. In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball.

Ed Lynskey

#68. I've been thinking of doing a sci-fi thriller or a sci-fi noir, if that's possible.

Kim Ji-woon

#69. 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

#70. Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses?

William Lindsay Gresham

#71. I'm not a fan of action movies. I don't watch many action movies, I don't have a lot of references except for 70s action movies or cinema noir.

Olivier Megaton

#72. A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone.

See Spot.

See Spot run.

See Spot run from a gaping chest wound.

Run Spot run.

See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.

J.E. Mac

#73. Some people were born just so they could be buried.

Donald Ray Pollock

#74. I'm a huge fan of Cabernet and Bordeaux, and am passionate about Pinot Noir and Burgundies.

Raymond E. Feist

#75. You use elements of noir, but you don't want it to be too noir-ish. You don't want it to be advertised as though you're asking people to go and watch an updated noir. I don't think they'll go do that. They want to see a modern story.

Danny Boyle

#76. When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.

Richard Stark

#77. All guys are scared of each other, didn't you know that? I'm not the only one. We're all born afraid.
("New York Blues")

Cornell Woolrich

#78. I don't carry a weapon, Mr. Bogatyrev. Not usually. I've never been in a situation where I needed one. Either the other guy has one, and I do what he says, or he doesn't, and I make him do what I say.

George Alec Effinger

#79. I don't know anybody who doesn't hate being called alt.country. It just sounds like a website. I don't mind being called Americana, I don't mind being called country noir, or independent country is fine, but the words alt.country make me insane.

Neko Case

#80. I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake

James M. Cain

#81. I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.

Raymond Chandler

#82. The biggest mistake you can make is thinking you know who you are.

J.P. Bloch

#83. ON PLAYING back the 911 recording, it'd seem that Mrs. Stegman was more concerned that the man outside her apartment door was naked than that he had a big shotgun.

Warren Ellis

#84. In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.

Mark Billingham

#85. Pinot noir is the ultimate wine to have at the table. It's a white wine masquerading as red ... [while] chardonnay is a red masquerading as a white.

Kevin Zraly

#86. You right," Hawk said. "Couldn't happen. Be like J. Edgar Hoover running around in a dress."
"Exactly," I said. "Impossible.

Robert B. Parker

#87. The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.

Jonathan Lethem

#88. I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear ... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes.

Maureen Dowd

#89. Old film-noir movies. There's something comforting about watching black-and-white movies, and hearing this kind of music just puts me in a fantasy world. It's a really great escape for me.

Petra Haden

#90. Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, 'Motherless Brooklyn,' is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul.

Gary Krist

#91. The white moth of hope fluttered before her face.

Cornell Woolrich

#92. 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

#93. Susan had decided to sit by the pool at the hotel with a copy of a book by Alice Miller called The Drama of the Gifted Child.

Robert B. Parker

#94. I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.

Walter Mosley

#95. Sandy's face was very close to mine in the crowded room. She had a wide mouth and a lot of teeth. She had turned in her seat so that she had one thigh on each side of my leg. Her chest was against my arm. In another minute we wouldn't have to go anywhere to have sex.

Robert B. Parker

#96. I was as empty of life as a scarecrow's pockets.

Raymond Chandler

#97. Heaven wouldn't be like this earth, this tormented earth ruled by evil forces that tossed humanity to and fro like a slow clown in a two-bit rodeo.

Joe LaFlam

#98. There's something magnetic about Jackson, and I can't even put my finger on it. He's unbelievably good looking, sure, but I've met good-looking men before. Is it the way that he's beyond confident, like he knows you're going to wind up in bed with him, it's just a matter of when?

Roxie Noir

#99. When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.

V.T. Davy

#100. Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing.

Barry Graham