Frank Miller Quotes

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.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

I love noir, quite obviously.

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 tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

I was very influenced by films and books like 'Serpico,' 'The French Connection,' and 'Prince of the City.' They were some of the reasons I became a crime writer.

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.

Very little other than Elmore Leonard's crime writing inspiring me on my Batman run.

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

George V. Higgins's 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' (1970) added an extra literary layer to the con novel; James Crumley's 'The Last Good Kiss' (1978) influenced countless writers and will be remembered forever for its opening line, quoted often in obituaries of the author.

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.

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley.

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

There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

I love Elmore Leonard. To me, True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie.

Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

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.

James Cain was saddled with being called the father of hardboiled fiction. Apparently, he didn't like this saddle.

I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.