Ian Fleming Quotes
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'Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.' He laughed. 'But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose a wonderful machine.'
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He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.
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Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.
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The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one is the same difference between a beautiful and a plain woman - a matter of millimetres.
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It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray and the bullet would never miss.
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...Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
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Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.
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All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.
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Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.
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These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men.
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I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It come partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It's very pernickety and oldmaidish really, but then when I'm working I generally have to eat my meals alone and it makes them more interesting when one takes trouble.
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Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.
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He sat down next door in the seat she had left and watched the grim suburbs of Philadelphia showing their sores, like beggars, to the rich train.
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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.
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Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.
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The bitch is dead now.
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And I would like a medium Vodka dry Martini - with a slice of lemon peel. Shaken and not stirred, please. I would prefer Russian or Polish vodka.
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All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards thier goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singlenee of purpose could have given focus to thier genius, would have kept them in the groove of purpose. Mania... is as priceless as genius.
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But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.
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I always make it a rule never to look back. Otherwise, I'd ask myself how I could write such piffle and live with myself, day after day.
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I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn’t care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn’t care, because none of them would ever own him—own any larger piece of him than I now did.
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And then one day when you're playing your little game you'll suddenly find yourself pinned down like a butterfly.
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When I wrote the first [Bond novel] in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard.
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Luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared Bond saw luck as a woman, to be softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued. But he was honest enough to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.