Goldfinger (James Bond, #7)

by Ian Fleming

Prohibition is the trigger of crime.

Was there any person in the world who wasn’t somehow, perhaps only statistically, involved in killing his neighbour?

Mr Du Pont was about fifty – pink, clean-shaven and dressed in the conventional disguise with which Brooks Brothers cover the shame of American millionaires.

Bond was interested in big crooks.

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.

one’s a fool not to make money when the odds are right.

When the odds aren’t right, make them right.” ’

‘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.’

‘Some love is fire, some love is rust. But the finest, cleanest love is lust.’

Saint Augustine: ‘Oh Lord, give me Chastity. But don’t give it yet!’

He was prepared to listen to anyone who was master of his subject, any subject.

Fear, Mr Bond, takes gold out of circulation and hoards it against the evil day.

‘It’s never too early to start winning.’

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.

It was always too early to start losing.

‘Always give the hole a chance!’

‘You drive for show, but you putt for dough’?

THERE ARE some rich men who use their riches like a club.

That is why they lead careful lives, not smoking or drinking, and why the one that wins is usually the one with the least imagination.

Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behaviour and practically the only one that is entirely against nature.

The Koreans have no such feelings. That is why the Japanese employed them as guards for their prison camps during the war. They are the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world.

‘Mr Bond, someone said that “law is the crystallized prejudices of the community”.

‘The safest way to double your money is fold it twice and put it in your pocket.’

Bond had never cared for Orleans. It was a priest and myth ridden town without charm or gaiety.

‘If you touch me there again you’ll have to marry me.’

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

‘Mr Bond, the word “pain” comes from the Latin poena meaning “penalty” – that which must be paid. You must now pay for the inquisitiveness which your attack upon me proves, as I suspected, to be inimical.

I am a poet in deeds

For death was the only exit.

Those terms included putting Oddjob and any other Korean firmly in his place, which, in Bond’s estimation, was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy.

He felt the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men.

And vision, mister, is a talent for mistaking spots before the eyes for fabulous projects.

Fort Knox is a myth like other myths.

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.

You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well, it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother.