Ian Fleming Quotes

And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.
Ian Fleming
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
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
Above all, he liked it that everything was one's own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
Ian Fleming
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.
Ian Fleming
Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.
Ian Fleming
The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
Ian Fleming
Bond had taken her to the station and had kissed her once hard on the lips and had gone away. It hadn't been love, but a quotation had come into Bond's mind as his cab moved out of Pennsylvania station: 'Some love is fire, some love is rust. But the finest, cleanest love is lust.
Ian Fleming
Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.
Ian Fleming
Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.
Ian Fleming
...Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
Ian Fleming
Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due.
Ian Fleming
They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.
Ian Fleming
Prohibition is the trigger of crime.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.
Ian Fleming
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success
Ian Fleming
Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
Ian Fleming
In angry protest the red telephone splintered the silence.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.
Ian Fleming
Now that little problem of yours, this business of not knowing good men from bad men and villains from heroes and so forth...There's still plenty for you to do. And you'll do it. And when you fall in love and have a mistress or a wife and children to look after, it will all seem easier." He opened the door but stopped on the threshold. "Surround yourself with human beings, my dear. They are easier to fight for than principles." He laughed. "But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine." With a wave of his hand he shut the door.
Ian Fleming
There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.
Ian Fleming
Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
My dear boy', Le Chiffre spoke like a father, 'the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups and you have already found it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to play games with adults and it very foolish of your nanny in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket. Very foolish indeed and most unfortunate for you.''But we must stop joking, my dear fellow, although I am sure you would like to follow me in developing this amusing little cautionary tale.
Ian Fleming
Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.
Ian Fleming
It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.
Ian Fleming
I've found that one must try and teach people that there's no top limit to disaster-that, so long as breath remains in your body, you've got accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition.
Ian Fleming
He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. "Give him one more chance.
Ian Fleming
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'.
Ian Fleming
A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.
Ian Fleming
You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.
Ian Fleming
Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
Ian Fleming
For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.
Ian Fleming
Unfortunately most ways of making big money take a long time. By the time one has made the money one is too old to enjoy it.
Ian Fleming
Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.
Ian Fleming
His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.
Ian Fleming
You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
I think it's the same with all the relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good.-- from Quantum of Solace
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
The conventional parabola--sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness--was to him shameful and hypocritical.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.
Ian Fleming
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.
Ian Fleming
You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face
Ian Fleming