Noir Genre Quotes

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

I was influenced by people like David Fincher and William Friedkin, and these directors who kinda paint their films with these dark shades.

I always think it's absurd when people go, 'How can you have a show about Batman without Batman?' 'Gotham' is plenty fascinating, 'Chinatown' style.

I always loved when James Stewart did roles that were not so dialogue-based, like 'Vertigo.'

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.

One of the things about the '70s films I love - the films 'Nightcrawler' is being compared to, like, 'Taxi Driver' - is that they never put their flawed characters into any one box.

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

The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.

'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.

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

I didn't expect anything crazy to happen from 'True Detective.'

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

With 'The Big Lebowski,' we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it's about L.A.

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

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.

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.

The stoic drama 'A Somewhat Gentle Man' is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard's complexion. It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.

I'm the world's greatest apologist for Brian De Palma but his version of Ellroy's 'The Black Dahlia' is a disaster.

I'm working on something that's not yet novel-shaped but is something of a film-noir-flavored 'Alice in Wonderland.' It will also very likely be a single volume story and not the start of a series.

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.

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

I do love a dark movie.

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.

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.

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