Top 40 Noir Quotes

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.

I’d never bought a bottle of cologne in my life, never dabbled in Drakkar Noir before the big high school date or Polo before the prom.

Director Lee Chang-dong’s 1997 noir ‘Green Fish.’ I was attending middle school when I first watched the piece. And although I could not completely understand the film and where it was getting at, I still found it extremely powerful.

I’m very influenced by documentary filmmaking and independent filmmaking, by a lot of noir and films from the ’40s. Those are my favorite. And then, filmmaking from the ’70s is a big influence for me.

Yeah, I was always a big fan of noir.

So I grew up watching film noir, you know the classic stuff. William Holden, Richard Widmark, Robert Mitchum, all those.

Sometimes it feels as if the artist hasn’t done the real work of engaging with the material. Film noir can’t just play off looks and attitudes. A thriller needs a dose of genuine suspense. It does not have to be literal, but it does have to feel genuine. Otherwise the artist is just leeching off the form.

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.

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.

I’m a genre writer – I chose to be one, I ended up one, I still am one, and I’m not writing transgressive, genre-blurring fiction. I write ‘core SF’ – it may occasionally incorporate horror or noir tropes, but it’s not pretending to be anything other than what it is.

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.

I’ve been a fan of noir films since I was in high school.

One reviewer dubbed my first book, ‘Getting Rid of Matthew,’ ‘chick noir,’ and another called it ‘anti chick lit,’ both of which I loved.

You’re immediately in a world of noir when you’re watching shows like ‘The Bridge’ or ‘The Killing.’

The AW14 collection is inspired by Film Noir. Elements of masculinity and femininity were reflected in the fabric, tailoring, and features.

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.

As brilliant as those dark Scandi noir dramas are, not everything has to be shot down a Danish alleyway.

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.

I love all kinds of stuff. I really am so eclectic in my taste. I love film noir, I love thrillers, and I love big blockbuster popcorn cinema stuff, but I like it when it’s twinged with a bit more social consciousness.

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

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

I wanted to work with Sriram Raghavan, the master of noir.

I grew up on film noir.

The thing I loved about the cartoons I grew up with is, to this day, I’m still just starting to get certain references from Bugs Bunny cartoons. I’ll see some film noir movie and go, ‘Wait, that’s what Bugs Bunny was quoting!’ I like the idea we made the unfolding fortune cookie for ten years from now.

At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality – moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion.

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.

Noir deals with the disenfranchised: people who can’t catch a break under normal circumstances. In noir books, you root for these people, but you know they are going to fail. That’s what makes them so compellingly human. I can relate to that kind of stuff.

Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir – novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen – were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.

Sometimes we have our perfect foils, or you can call them their bete noir: the person who brings out both the best and the worst in you because you disagree with them so completely. Yet, you understand and respect them enough to give it your all.

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.

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.

I love noir, quite obviously.

I’m always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That’s why ‘Mildred Pierce’ is like noir without any real crime.

I’m not Josh Brolin or Ryan Gosling. They’re more noir than I.

Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?

Noir has always shown that greed and chaos are as close as the company we work for or the politicians we vote for.

Here’s what I’m going to say about that: my personal thought about the brilliance of ‘Peeno Noir’ as proven by the fans’ appreciation is that, when watched back, what makes it so exciting is the random locations and the random costume changes and the multiple shots that we’ve done all over the city.

It’s possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it’s possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

‘100 Bullets’ is such a post-modern noir; there are certain rules you gotta follow.

A lot of people think I must be like Vince Noir. He’s a bit like a child. He doesn’t have any malice. He’s even friendly to monsters. I am like that, I guess. I talk to anyone.