Quotes About Noir

#1. 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

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

John Geddes

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Dennis Lehane

#7. 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.

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

Rex Pickett

#9. 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

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

Claire Denis

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Duane Swierczynski

#18. 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

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

Dean Cavanagh

#20. 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

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

Rob Thomas

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

Kim Ji-woon

#23. 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

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

Raymond E. Feist

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.

James Ellroy

#33. Lipstick stains on a cigarette filter summons to mind noir evenings of decadence. A girl with carmine lips smoking is obviously a girl who does not intend to go home alone that night.

Chloe Thurlow

#34. I'd love to play a femme fatale in a film noir. I'm thinking of one of those roles that Lauren Bacall or Bette Davis might have played. What I wouldn't like is to suddenly find myself being cast, as many senior actresses seem to be, as the abbess in a convent.

Diana Quick

#35. Blade Runner's just a noir at the end of the day. Rosemary's Baby is about the fear of having a child and how that gets in the way of a romantic relationship. Or whatever it is, and you add that extra element that blows your mind apart.

James Ponsoldt

#36. That's what noir feels like to me. It feels like some kind of recurring dream, with very strong archetypes operating. You know, the guilty girl being pursued, falling, all kinds of stuff that we see in our dreams all the time.

Brian De Palma

#37. Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

Pauline Kael

#38. Nights like this," someone had told him, not so long ago, "feel like the world's waiting for something." He was sure, in hindsight, that on that night on a back step with a shared bottle of grocery store Pinot Noir, the girl beside him had wanted the two of them to be that something special.

Lauren Gilley

#39. Flawed characters ... a ticking clock ... morally questionable acts on all sides ... moody, evocative art ... oh yeah, this the stuff crime noir fans love!

Christos Gage

#40. Where are we? (Jericho)
Noir's happy place. It's where he brings the beings he wants to play with. (Asmodeus)
Punish. (Jericho)
You say ta-mah-to. I say to-mah-to. (Asmodeus)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#41. With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

Lana Wachowski

#42. I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

Marie Windsor

#43. I always had this notion of a noir novel in Galway. The city is exploding, emigration has reversed, and we are fast becoming a cosmopolitan city.

Ken Bruen

#44. There is something missing in a lot of digital filmmaking, something I call "poetic reality." That's something you see played out in film noir, where the technique establishes the mood.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#45. I told you not to piss off Noir. One day you're going to listen to me. (Asmodeus)
Why start now? (Jaden)
Ah, you're right. Bled so much now, it doesn't really matter, does it? (Asmodeus)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#46. I can't believe I was ever stupid enough to trust Noir. Come to the dark side. We have cookies. (Zeth)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#47. As long as you have an empty wine glass I can borrow," I say, pulling a jumbo-sized bottle of Pinot Noir from my bag. "Or a really long straw. Either one.

Julie Johnson

#48. American Black Chamber, borrowing the name from the sixteenth-century cabinet noir, the secret letter-opening and resealing facility of King Henry IV of France.

Gabriel Schoenfeld

#49. This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice
blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Stephen Graham Jones

#50. But, number one, I think traditional noir doesn't work in contemporary storytelling because we don't live in that world anymore.

Brian De Palma

#51. 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

#52. Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

Adrian McKinty

#53. I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

Lawrence Block

#54. Her cooking suggested she had attended the Cordon Noir.

Leo Rosten

#55. I so love the smell of hatred and revenge. It's the headiest of concoctions. (Noir)
I personally feel that way toward blood. No better smell in the universe than when it's combined with the aroma of those fearing death. (Jericho)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#56. I pity those born of the lighter side. They have no understanding of how seductive cruelty is. The music made out of screams and pleas for mercy. Mmmm. Nothing better. (Noir)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#57. Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film 'noir', as opposed to the possible variants of film gray or film off-white.

Paul Schrader

#58. Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing.

David Lynch

#59. I've been a fan of noir films since I was in high school.

Francis Lawrence

#60. The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time.

Frank Miller

#61. Pinot Noir country. My grape. The one varietal that truly enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her siren call until my wallet--or liver, whichever came first--gave out.

Rex Pickett

#62. ...for people like me, People Who Drink Too Much Pinot Noir and Dance Dance Dance. Always the Dancing. I drink Pinot Noir. I Dance. I am Garbage.

Pablo Fenjves

#63. I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

Frank Miller

#64. There were some things that I found I really enjoyed singing about; like, on the title track, there's this film-noir character of a woman who's sort of losing it in a room.

Diana Krall

#65. I guess what's most surprised me in most of the reviews is that they don't seem to get the noir story in the dream sequence, so they analyze it like a straight noir movie.

Brian De Palma

#66. One definition of noir is where a not-so-good man or woman tries to touch something good - and fails.

S.J. Rozan

#67. He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it.

Khaled Hosseini

#68. [on Springsteen's "Stolen Car":] A kind of mystical film noir, written by Kafka and shot by Polanski.

Adam Sweeting

#69. Going back to the noir fiction of the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's very contemporary.

Jeff Goldblum

#70. Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.

Adrian McKinty

#71. noir. In those dreams, I stand up after passionate sex with

Julie Buxbaum

#72. 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

#73. Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

Elliott Colla

#74. I'm working on something that's not yet novel-shaped but is something of a film-noir-flavored 'Alice in Wonderland.' It will also very likely be a single volume story and not the start of a series.

Erin Morgenstern

#75. When we say 'cinematic', we tend to think John Ford and vistas and wide-open spaces. Or we think of kinetic camera movement or of a certain number of cinematic styles, like film noir.

Lenny Abrahamson

#76. Yeah, I was always a big fan of noir.

Robert Rodriguez

#77. Andrew Vachss, the best noir-ey writer in the history of the genre, called cats the lap dancers of the animal world. Give them attention, they're there. Stop, they're outta there.

MaryJanice Davidson

#78. When I pair food and wine, I start with the food. If I have a beautiful roasted bird, I might choose a Cabernet or Pinot Noir, or maybe a Syrah, depending on the sauce and what is in my cellar.

Jacques Pepin

#79. I was always into noir. When I lived in Vermont I was drawing stuff that looked like an amateur doing Sin City. When I first got to New York I was swiftly informed that they only did guys in tights.

Frank Miller

#80. I want you to show him to Zeth and the rest of the Olympian dogs who fight for us. (Noir)
Anything else, Master? Lick your boots? Wipe your ass? (Asmodeus)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#81. Barbara Stanwyck, in particular, was peerless in everything from high and low comedy to drama to musicals to film noir. She never took a false step.

Eve Golden

#82. I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

Werner Herzog

#83. One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.

Roger Ebert

#84. I'm not Josh Brolin or Ryan Gosling. They're more noir than I.

Anthony Mackie

#85. God made Cabernet Sauvignon, whereas the Devil made Pinot Noir.

Andre Tchelistcheff

#86. I admire hard-bitten, wisecracking realism of Ida Lupino and the film noir heroines. I'm sick of simpering white girls with their princess fantasies.

Camille Paglia

#87. I think the original Matrix was really incredible. It was so original and it did so many innovative things with film. It was a much bigger film. Bound was just a smaller film. It was kind of like an old noir film.

Gina Gershon

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

Robert B. Parker

#89. [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

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

Henry Mosquera

#91. 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

#92. 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

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

Robert B. Parker

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. 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

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

Richard Stark

#99. 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

#100. 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