Top 135 Noir Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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.

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

It's a noir world. Unfair things happen.

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.

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

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.

My big love is red wine and I once went to a vineyard in the Marlborough region of New Zealand, where we drank exquisite pinot noir.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I like Public School and En Noir.

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

Jody Houser, who writes Mother Panic, has this noir-ish superhero style. She's very adaptable.

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.

Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.

I love film noir, so Billy Wilder is like my favorite director of all time.

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.

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 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.

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 think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.

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

I grew up on film noir.

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.

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

I love noir, quite obviously.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I wouldn't apply high frame rates to a love story or a thriller or a film noir or a mystery.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Her cooking suggested she had attended the Cordon Noir.

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

Noir' has been talked about a great deal in the discussion of 'The Black Dahlia,' but De Palma's palllete couldn't be less monochrome; it's the very definition of garish.

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah, I was always a big fan of noir.

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.