You Only Live Twice (James Bond, #12)

by Ian Fleming

It was a mask with a golden hole in it.

“It is the man who drinks the first flask of saké; then the second flask drinks the first; then it is the saké that drinks the man.”

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 to accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition.

The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser.

The state of your health, the state of the weather, the wonders of nature – these are things that rarely occupy the average man’s mind until he reaches the middle thirties. It is only on the threshold of middle-age that you don’t take them all for granted, just part of an unremarkable background to more urgent, more interesting things.

It’s their bones that matter, not their lying faces. And all those races have got tremendous bones. Compared with the bones, the smiles or scowls don’t mean a thing.

He said you can only make good whisky where you can take good photographs.

“Speak of next year and the devil laughs”. The future is inscrutable.

It is an unfortunate combination to be both lonely and intelligent.

‘Honour is a pattern of behaviour, Commander. The bamboo must bend to the breeze. But equally the cedar must bend to the typhoon.

The Oriental way of life is particularly attractive to the American who wishes to escape from a culture which, I am sure you will agree, has become, to say the least of it, more and more unattractive except to the lower grades of the human species to whom bad but plentiful food, shiny toys such as the automobile and the television, and the “quick buck”, often dishonestly earned, or earned in exchange for minimal labour or skills, are the summum bonum, if you will allow the sentimental echo from my Oxford education.’

Honour is more important to us than life – more proud, more beautiful.’

Further, your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money.

If his wife is with him, you will throttle her too. She is certainly involved in all this business, and anyway she is too ugly to live.

“A reasonable number of fleas is good for a dog. Otherwise the dog forgets he is a dog.” ’

A sort of Disneyland of Death.

‘The Nelson Touch’

‘I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.’