Ian Fleming Quotes

...Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.

Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.

She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well she found me in the mountains and she was raped - by me.

He provides a vision. He often reminds countries of their responsibilities in a way that makes it seem not only like a legal obligation but a moral responsibility.

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.

And then one day when you're playing your little game you'll suddenly find yourself pinned down like a butterfly.

Before a man's forty, girls cost nothing. After that you have to pay money, or tell a story. Of the two, it's the story that hurts most. Anyway I'm not forty yet.

I'm looking for Commander James Bond, not an overgrown stunt man. [on meeting Sean Connery]

I don't regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way.

His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.

Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.

You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.

The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one is the same as the difference between a beautiful and a plain woman --a matter of millimetres.

Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: 'They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings.

When she had failed once or twice to respond to some conversational gambit or other, Bond also relapsed into silence and occupied himself with his own gloomy thoughts.

When the odds are hopeless, when all seems to be lost, then is the time to be calm, to make a show of authority – at least of indifference

People are islands, ' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

If you fail at the large things it means you have not large ambitions. Concentration, focus - that is all. The aptitudes come, the tools forge themselves.

You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face

They want us dead, ' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.

You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.

History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.

A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.

Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim's head or Bond's brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness.

Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes, ’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.

Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.

Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead.

Who is this man?''Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No - Doctor Julius No.''No? Spelt like Yes?''That's right.

Each dark conjecture came and for a moment settled like a vulture on Bond's shoulder and croaked into his ear that he had been a blind fool.

In angry protest the red telephone splintered the silence.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success

Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.

Outside the bus the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a horrible smell, from somewhere down in the stomach of the world.

Prohibition is the trigger of crime.

Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due.