Otto Penzler > Quotes

“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.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best American Noir of the Century

“She (Patricia Higsmith) was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being…I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly…. But her books? Brilliant.”
― Otto Penzler

“I went over and rolled the woman over on her back. She couldn’t have been much over twenty-two or three; little, gray-eyed blonde. There was a knife in her side, under the arm. There was a .38 automatic near her outstretched hand. She was very dead.”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The '20s, '30s & '40s

“My wife has been on my tail six weeks with a blackmail gag,” he went on. “She’s here. When I got back to the hotel a little while ago she came into my room and put on an act.” I thought then I knew who Gard’s client was. “She came in this afternoon. She’s got the room next to mine.” He was silent so long that I laughed a little and said: “So what?” “I’ve got to duck, quick,” he went on. “She’s a bad actor. She came into my room and put on an act. She’s got a guy with her that’s supposed to be her brother and he’s a bad actor, too. You said you were going to drive back to LA. I saw your name on the register when I came in and I thought you might take me along. I can’t rent a car here and there isn’t a train till midnight.” He pulled the biggest roll I ever saw out of his pocket and skimmed off a couple notes. “If it’s a question of money …”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The '20s, '30s & '40s

“I got better than that. I got a life insurance philosophy.” “What’s that?” Katrina asked. “As long as I’m worth more alive than dead I won’t have to worry about banana peels and bad broth.”
― Otto Penzler, Dangerous Women

“we carry into the next world the traits and feelings that have got the better of us”
― Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Ghost Stories: The Most Complete Collection of Uncanny, Spooky, Creepy Tales Ever Published

“These comments have been offered by those who abuse the privilege of being stupid, but I thank them for their interest.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years

“Noir is about losers. The characters in these existential, nihilistic tales are doomed. They may not die, but they probably should, as the life that awaits them is certain to be so ugly, so lost and lonely, that they'd be better off just curling up and getting it over with. And, let's face it, they deserve it.

Pretty much everyone in a noir story (or film) is driven by greed, lust, jealousy or alienation, a path that inevitably sucks them into a downward spiral from which they cannot escape. They couldn't find the exit from their personal highway to hell if flashing neon lights pointed to a town named Hope. It is their own lack of morality that blindly drives them to ruin.”
― Otto Penzler

“Yeah, well, I don’t go there, Stace. Trying to figure what lobsters feel, that’s the road to vegetarianism. The road to vegansville.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years

“In the midst of life we are in death.”
― Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Ghost Stories: The Most Complete Collection of Uncanny, Spooky, Creepy Tales Ever Published

“The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrensy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl,”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

“reached in a little handbag and took out a blue-steel automatic which she placed on the table. Then she hesitated”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The '20s, '30s & '40s

“A man who has faith is somebody who can be saved.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years

“SOME WOMEN HAVE SAID that Mrs. Pym was never young, that even in her initial stages she was probably an elderly baby. Obviously, such women should drink milk out of saucers; still, it is a fact that Mrs. Pym was somehow stolid, enormously capable, and frequently harsh, even in the early 1920’s when she must have been around thirty. She affected the same ugly tweeds, the same enchantingly insane hats, and the same air of magnificent omnipotence as she does today. But her hair was brown then, with only the faintest touch of her current greyness. Her speech was as biting, and her contempt for authority and inefficiency as ready as on that notable day when she crashed the shocked portals of New Scotland Yard, the first woman ever to hold rank in Central C.I.D., where, in these present jittery times of nuclear fission and H-bombs, she is Mrs. Assistant-Commissioner Pym.”
― Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Female Detectives

“He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you. She”
― Otto Penzler, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014: The Year's Premier Short Story Anthology of Crime Books and Mysteries

“Edward wants a model railway engine for his set.” “Does he indeed?” “A Hornby LMS red engine called ‘Princess Elizabeth,’ ” said Wendy Witherington readily. “It’s a 4—6—2.”
― Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries

“Communism is a hatred of the poor for the rich—not simply an envy.”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The '20s, '30s & '40s

“At Cato’s Irene Mayo waited in the booth McFee usually occupied. She wore a green felt beret, a string of pearls and a knitted green silk suit with white cuffs.”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age - The '20s, '30s & '40s

“Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them,” Holmes stated in The Sign of the Four. “I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance money.”
― Otto Penzler, Dangerous Women

“I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle,’ as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.”
― Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

“combat boots and helmets. The breeze rose and he walked crabwise, trying to give”
― Otto Penzler, The Best American Mystery Stories 2014: The Year's Premier Short Story Anthology of Crime Books and Mysteries

“Abington, Glass of ’64. Jenny was a year behind me and Wayne.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years

“because the rest of the relics in the place lurched toward me then, like some nursing-home theater guild performing Night of the Living Dead.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years

“You think people open their eyes just because you tell them to look? There’s no happily-ever-after on this. You’re dreaming.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years

“a town that smelled of chicken guts, hog manure, and rampant incest, which seemed to be the three main industries.”
― Otto Penzler, The Best of the Best American Mystery Stories: The First Ten Years