Between Quote by Roger Ebert

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would…

— Samuel Fuller

Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book…

— Otto Penzler

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…

— Werner Herzog

I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access…

— Richard K. Morgan

“For my money, noir boils down to bleak humanism – or, to put it more plainly: shit options, bad decisions, and dire consequences. The…

— Chris F. Holm

“Both are also examples of film noir, a postwar genre commonly understood (even to the point of cliché) as being aesthetically and ideologically driven…

— Sianne Ngai

“The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world…

— Francis M. Nevins

To me, the most interesting approach to film noir is subjective. The genre is really all about not knowing what's going on around you,…

— Christopher Nolan

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

— Marie Windsor

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…

— Brian Azzarello

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

— Claire Denis

Film noir is not a genre. It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but…

— Paul Schrader