Ian Fleming > Quotes

“You only live twice:
Once when you're born
And once when you look death in the face.”
― Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

“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, Casino Royale

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

“Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“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.”
― Ian Fleming

“A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.”
― Ian Fleming

“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”
― Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

“Mine’s Bond – James Bond.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“Never say 'no' to adventures.”
― Ian Fleming, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success”
― Ian Fleming

“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 than breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?”
― Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

“Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“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, Casino Royale

“The World Is Not Enough”
― Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service

“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, Goldfinger

“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, From Russia With Love

“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, Casino Royale

“Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.”
― Ian Fleming, Moonraker

“Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.”
― Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

“...Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.”
― Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

“I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.”
― Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

“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?”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“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'.”
― Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die

“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.”
― Ian Fleming, For Your Eyes Only

“He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”
― Ian Fleming

“They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.”
― Ian Fleming, Moonraker

“Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.”
― Ian Fleming, Doctor No

“The gain to the winner is always less than the loss to the loser.”
― Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die

“It reads better than it lives”
― Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever

“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, Casino Royale

“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, Casino Royale

“The bitch is dead now.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.”
― Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever

“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, Casino Royale

“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.”
― Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever

“Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“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, Casino Royale

“What's your name?"
"Bond. James Bond. What's yours?"
She reflected "Rider."
"What Rider?"
"Honeychile."
Bond smiled.”
― Ian Fleming, Doctor No

“And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.”
― Ian Fleming, Moonraker

“It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.”
― Ian Fleming, Thunderball

“Look my friend, I've got to commit a murder tonight. Not you. Me. So be a good chap and stuff it, would you?”
― Ian Fleming, Octopussy & The Living Daylights

“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, From Russia With Love

“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.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“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, The Spy Who Loved Me

“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.”
― Ian Fleming, Thunderball

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”
― 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, For Your Eyes Only

“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, The Spy Who Loved Me