Ian Fleming Quotes

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

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

I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.

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.

Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action

Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.

A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.

I want to be more like James Bond, and less like Ian Fleming.

Mine’s Bond – James Bond.

Never say 'no' to adventures.

Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.

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.

It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.

Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

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.

The World Is Not Enough

Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.

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

Bond always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big - bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.

Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.

A dry martini,' he said. 'One. In a deep champagne goblet.' ... Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?

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

It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.

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.

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.

Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it.

Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.

The gain to the winner is always less than the loss to the loser.

The bitch is dead now.

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

Prohibition is the trigger of crime.

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.

And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.

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

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.

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

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

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'.

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.

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

He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.

It reads better than it lives

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.

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.

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 such a wonderful machine.

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.

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

You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. "Huh," "hun," and "hi!" in their various modulations, together with "sure," "guess so," "that so?" and "nuts!" will meet almost any contingency.

In their talk there was nothing but companionship with a distant undertone of passion. In the background there was the unspoken zest of the promise which, in due course and in their own time, would be met.

He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.

I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad.

And don't get hurt,' [Dexter] added. 'There's no one to help you up there. And don't go stirring up a lot of trouble for us. This case isn't ripe yet. Until it is, our policy with Mr Big is 'live and let live'.' Bond looked quizzically at Captain Dexter In my job,' he said, 'when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It's 'live and let die'.

I don’t drink tea. I hate it. It’s mud. Moreover it’s one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.

In his mind he fingered the necklace of the days to come.

Once a King, always a King. But once a Knight is enough!

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.

Unless she married soon, Bond thought for the hundredth time, or had a lover, her cool air of authority might easily become spinsterish and she would join the army of women who had married a career.

Look my friend, I've got to commit a murder tonight. Not you. Me. So be a good chap and stuff it, would you?

James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.

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.

Why not make it for always?

Never send a man where you can send a bullet.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

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.

'Those who deserve to die, he paused, 'die the death they deserve' " - Mr Big

Before he slept he reflected, as he had often reflected in other moments of triumph at the card table, that the gain to the winner is, in some odd way, always less than the loss to the loser.

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.

It is not just a question of blowing up a building or shooting a prime minister. Such bourgeois horseplay is not contemplated. Our operation must be delicate, refined and aimed at the heart of the Intelligence apparat of the West.

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.

Bond didn't defend the practice. He simply maintained that the more effort and ingenuity you put into gambling, the more you took out.

What's your name?" "Bond. James Bond. What's yours?" She reflected "Rider." "What Rider?" "Honeychile." Bond smiled.

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.

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.

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general, Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger, and two women nearly as lethal. Women together cannot keep silent in a car, and when women talk they have to look into each other’s faces. An exchange of words is not enough. They have to see the other person’s expression, perhaps to read behind the others’ words or analyze the reaction to their own. So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other’s attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous for the driver not only has to hear and see, what her companion is saying but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.

[W]hen one’s young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong, but as one gets older it becomes more difficult. At school it’s easy to pick out one’s own villains and heroes and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the villains.

I'm getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance...the Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography.

The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris. Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the labored breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another.

Bond liked fast cars and he liked driving them. Most American cars bored him. ... All the fun of driving had been taken out of them with the abolition of a gear-change... All effort had been smoothed away and all of that close contact with the machine and the road that extracts skill and nerve from the European driver.

Bond insisted ordering Leiter’s Haig-and-Haig ”on the rocks” and then he looked carefully at the barman. ”A Dry Martini", he said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet.” ”Oui, monsieur.” Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemonpeel. Got it?" ”Certainly, monsieur.” The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality.' As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits--barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

Anyway, I make up my own mind about men and women. What's the good of other people's opinions? Animals don't consult each other about other animals. They look and sniff and feel. In love and hate, and everything in between, those are the only tests that matter. But people are unsure of their own instincts. They want reassurance. So they ask someone else whether they should like a particular person or not. And as the world loves bad news, they nearly always get a bad answer--or at least a qualified one.

Ian Fleming The CBC Interview, 1953 He doesn’t use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, “I don’t like seeing them on the page.” When asked why his novels are so popular in light of the dirtiness of the trade (of espionage), Fleming said, “The books have pace and plenty of action. And espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade. They regard it as a rather sort of ah, ah very romantic affair… Spying has always been regarded as (a) very romantic one-man job, so-to-speak. A one man against a whole police force or an army.” Regarding heroes of his time, Fleming said, “I think that although they may have feet of clay, ah, we probably all have, and all human beings have, there’s no point in dwelling entirely on the feet. There are many other parts of the animal to be examined. And I think people like to read about heroes.” BBC Interview on Desert Island Discs Question: Had the character of James Bond been growing in your mind for a long time? Ian Fleming’s response: “No, I can’t say I had, really. He sort of, ah, developed when I was just on the edge of getting married, after having been a bachelor for so long, and I really wanted to take my mind off the agony. And so I decided to sit down and write a book.” Question: How much long do you think you can keep Bond going? Ian Fleming’s response: “Well, I don’t know. It depends on how much I, how much more I can go on following his adventures.” Question: You don’t feel he’s keeping you from more serious writing? Ian Fleming’s response: “No. I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I’ve got no ambitions.

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. 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. When that happened he knew that he too would be branded with the deadly question-mark he recognized so often in others, the promise to pay before you have lost: the acceptance of fallibility.