Noir Atmosphere Quotes

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

'The Big Sleep' would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart's relation to the crime.

I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books.

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

I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

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.

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

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.

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.

I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.

The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society - nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.

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

I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?

There is something about the name Berlin that evokes an image of men in hats and long coats standing under streetlamps on rainy nights.

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.

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 would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.

A guy named Peter Rabe wrote a batch of books for Gold Medal in the '50s, and he was absolutely the single largest influence on writing style. I was completely in love with the way the man wrote.

Ross McDonald had a greater influence on me than any other writer. His style of writing, the repeated theme of the past coming out to grab somebody, that's very attractive to me as a reader and, now, as a writer.

I was well under the spell of the old Gold Medal Crime novels when I wrote 'Savage Season,' and I wanted to write a modern version of that. I had tried the same thing with 'Cold in July,' and I wanted to give it another go.

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.