Top Noir Quotes

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.

Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street's dead to the world...

Somebody should have taken him to a stationary store and pointed out the difference between an envelope and a whore.

And he's alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he's never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.He wants to sleep so badly - dying they call...

Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced Cherchez la femme that still...

I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman.

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used s...

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

We don’t know when the first star exploded, or when the sun caught on fire. We don’t know when the sun will stop burning and turn cold and dark, though we know it will.In between the fire and the cold...

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them

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, li...

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.

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.

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us,...

Noir is a court of human relations, and some crimes are beyond legal restitution.

I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn’t anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned restau...

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an ab...

I'd done it, I'd crossed the line between accepted behavior and behavior most of the population would consider a lynching offense, and that morning I felt as real as any of the men in the Escape comme...

Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.

Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think...