Thrilling Cities Quotes

“What is the matter? I suppose, and many intelligent American writers support my suspicion, that she has four basic troubles—first, the collapse of the family unit which today hardly exists in American towns; secondly, Momism and the vast economic power (via alimony, inheritance and other factors) held by women in America; thirdly, self-hypnotism about the ‘American way of life’, a concept which needs drastic re-examination by those who invented the slogan; and, fourthly, escapism and flight from reality, whether this takes the shape of the television myth and the enchanted world of the ad man which seek to show people as better than they know perfectly well they are, or of such escapist drugs as the tranquillizer pill,”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“The seventy million cubic metres of rubble in Berlin are gradually being made into mountains, which then will be turfed and have trees planted on them. These mountains are known as Monte Klamotten—Rubbish Mountains—and the total operation is known as ‘Hitler’s Collected Works’.”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“When I get on an aircraft all I can see outside is wing.’ The American next to her had said, ‘Listen, Ma’am, you go right on seeing that wing. Start worrying when you can’t see it any longer.”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“I am allergic to almost every form of international agency, conference or committee.”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“Now, at the Eldorado, for instance, and the Eden (where a homemade bomb went off, wounding three guests, ten minutes after we had left)”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“the greatly exaggerated hullabaloo recently created, largely by newspapers wanting ‘a story’, about the resurgence of Nazism and anti-Semitism.”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“complete standstill in all literary and artistic progress of any kind since Hitler because of the absence of Jews, the former leaven in the heavy German bread,”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“there was no beatnik movement in Germany because there were now no traditions to revolt against;”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“The Germans, anyway a hysterical race, are now almost maddened by overwork—particularly in the management class. They spend their days in their offices and then roar off down the autobahns. They fall asleep at eighty miles an hour, and their cars tear across the middle section, head-on into cars in the opposite lane, or dive off the shoulders of the roads into the trees. To prevent this, the drivers munch Pervitin or Preludin to keep themselves awake, thus submerging their exhaustion and heightening their tension. Heart disease, accelerated by over-eating food cooked in the universal cheap frying-fat, carries them off in their early fifties,”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“That all these buildings strike me and most Berliners as quite hideous cannot alter the fact that only by these vertical means could the government of West Berlin have managed to tuck away nearly half a million inhabitants in something over ten years, and one only has to go over to the Eastern Sector and drive down the pretentious turn-of-the-century Tiflis-style Stalin Allee to accept the fact that all the ‘new world’, independent of nationality, is getting more and more hideous every day.”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“they came up with the idea that I should make a round-trip of the most exciting cities of the world and describe them in beautiful, beautiful prose. This could be accomplished, they said, within a month.”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities

“(At an intersection on the main road from Nyon to Geneva, for instance, there is a neat villa, window-boxes and all, that reveals itself on closer inspection to be a mighty stressed-concrete pillbox.) Military”
― Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities