Man Solo

“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")”
― Cornell Woolrich, The Ten Faces of Cornell Woolrich: An Inner Sanctum Collection of Novelettes and Short Stories

“It's just some instinct as old as fear: you seek the dark when you hide, you seek the light when the need to hide is gone. All the animals have it too.

("New York Blues")”
― Cornell Woolrich, Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich

“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