Top 100 Ian Fleming Quotes
#2. I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.
Ian Fleming
#3. Never send a man where you can send a bullet.
Ian Fleming
#4. Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.
Ian Fleming
#5. One Saturday, he had gone to take the subway to Pennsylvania Station en route for the Soviet week-end rest camp at Glen Cove, the former Morgan estate on Long Island.
Ian Fleming
#6. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure
the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.
Ian Fleming
#7. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.
Ian Fleming
#8. 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
#9. A medium Vodka dry Martini - with a slice of lemon peel. Shaken and not stirred.
Ian Fleming
#10. Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation
Ian Fleming
#11. The first thing he noticed was that Las Vegas seemed to have invented a new school of functional architecture, 'The Gilded Mousetrap School' he thought it might be called, whose main purpose was to channel the customer-mouse into the central gambling trap whether he wanted the cheese or not.
Ian Fleming
#12. Suspiciously Bond walked over and examined the screws which secured the panel to
Ian Fleming
#13. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.
Ian Fleming
#14. Bond sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined sailor's face that he loved, honoured and obeyed.
Ian Fleming
#15. It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture, and dainty curtains.
Ian Fleming
#16. 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.
Ian Fleming
#17. I should spend the money quickly, Commander Bond.
Ian Fleming
#18. I'm looking for Commander James Bond, not an overgrown stunt man. [on meeting Sean Connery]
Ian Fleming
#19. They had a table near the rail round the huge floor. Bond was spellbound. He found many of the girls very beautiful. The music hammered its way into his pulse until he almost forgot what he was there for.
Ian Fleming
#20. (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
#21. And now that you have seen a really evil man, you will know how evil they can be and you will go after them to destroy them in order to protect yourself and the people you love. You won't wait to argue about it. You know what they look like now and what they can do to people.
Ian Fleming
#22. Be that as it may, it is here that Le Chiffre will, we are confident, endeavour on or after 15 June to make a profit at baccarat of fifty million francs on a working capital of twenty-five million. (And, incidentally, save his life.)
Ian Fleming
#23. 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.
Ian Fleming
#24. He suddenly dropped his bantering tone and looked at Bond sharply and venomously.
Ian Fleming
#25. Where am I?' he asked and was surprised that his voice sounded firm and clear.
Ian Fleming
#26. Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.
Ian Fleming
#27. Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
Ian Fleming
#28. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little, allowed him to give or take an hour or two in his communications with M.
Ian Fleming
#29. A horse is dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle.
Ian Fleming
#30. Even the highest tree has an axe waiting at its foot.
Ian Fleming
#31. And then one day when you're playing your little game you'll suddenly find yourself pinned down like a butterfly.
Ian Fleming
#32. 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.
Ian Fleming
#33. He could not just wear a watch. It had to be a Rolex.
Ian Fleming
#34. Once a King, always a King. But once a Knight is enough!
Ian Fleming
#35. 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.
Ian Fleming
#36. 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
#37. 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.
Ian Fleming
#38. And of course, Japan, with the highest suicide statistics in the world, a country with an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible, would provide the perfect last refuge for him.
Ian Fleming
#39. He wore a heavy black moustache and the backs of his hands on the rail were matted with black hair. Bond guessed that hair covered most of his squat body. Naked, Bond supposed, he would be an obscene object.
Ian Fleming
#40. Put your guns away and get him out,' he ordered brusquely. 'I'll keep you covered. Be careful of him. I don't want a corpse. And hurry up, it's getting light.
Ian Fleming
#41. The stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher.
Ian Fleming
#42. I do believe I'm tight,' she said, 'how disgraceful. Please, James, don't be ashamed of me. I did so want to be gay. And I am gay.
Ian Fleming
#43. 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?
Ian Fleming
#44. AS, TWO weeks later, James Bond awoke in his room at the Hotel Splendide, some of this history passed through his mind.
Ian Fleming
#45. How soon Mathis had been proved right and how soon his own little sophistries had been exploded in his face!
Ian Fleming
#46. Bond again walked round the room. This time he carefully inspected the walls and the neighbourhood of the bed and the telephone. Why not take the room? Why would there be microphones or secret doors? What would be the point of them?
Ian Fleming
#47. The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service.
Ian Fleming
#48. Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses,
Ian Fleming
#50. Out of the mouth of the huge, shadowed poster, between the great violet lips, half-open in ecstasy, the dark shape of a man emerged and hung down like a worm from the mouth of a corpse.
Ian Fleming
#51. Bond looked at the beautiful day and smiled. And no man, not even Mr. Big, would have liked the expression on his face.
Ian Fleming
#52. Shooting hell out of a piece of cardboard doesn't prove anything' was his single-line introduction to the Small-arms Defence Manual.
Ian Fleming
#53. Vesper smiled at him. 'I like it,' she said. 'I like doing everything fully, getting the most out of everything one does. I think that's the way to live. But it sounds rather schoolgirlish when one says it,' she added apologetically.
Ian Fleming
#54. Her breasts were showing and Mr. Player, who was a very strong Quaker, didn't think that was quite proper.
Ian Fleming
#56. Darling, the bath's absolutely right. Will you marry me?'
She snorted. 'You need a slave, not a wife.
Ian Fleming
#58. I prefer to regard myself as one who has the ability and the mental and nervous equipment to make his own laws and act according to them rather than accept the laws that suit the lowest common denominator of the people.
Ian Fleming
#60. Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, 'Casino Royale' dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
Ian Fleming
#61. Miss Moneypenny would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical.
Ian Fleming
#62. He provides a vision. He often reminds countries of their responsibilities in a way that makes it seem not only like a legal obligation but a moral responsibility.
Ian Fleming
#63. Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
Ian Fleming
#64. Mistress Agatha Brown, she was Church of England, but she just done gone to the Catholics. And it seems they don't hold with places like 3½, not even when they're decently run.
Ian Fleming
#65. Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.
Ian Fleming
#66. Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim's head or Bond's brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness.
Ian Fleming
#67. It's just that I'd rather die of drink than of thirst.
Ian Fleming
#68. A few hundred yards ahead a Michelin post showed where a small parochial road crossed with the highway.
Ian Fleming
#69. I was just running away from the person I'd been for the past five years. I wasn't particularly pleased with the person I was now, but I had hated and despised the other one, and I was glad to be rid of her face.
Ian Fleming
#70. 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.
Ian Fleming
#73. Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.
Ian Fleming
#74. 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
#75. James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.
Ian Fleming
#76. Slowly the red dawn broke over the endless plain of black grass that gradually turned to the famous Kentucky blue as the sun ironed out the shadows.
Ian Fleming
#77. Bond found this irksome. He disliked being cosseted. It gave him claustrophobia.
Ian Fleming
#78. People do connect me with James Bond simply because I happen to like scrambled eggs and short-sleeved shirts and some of the things that James Bond does, but I certainly haven't got his guts nor his very lively appetites.
Ian Fleming
#79. The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success
Ian Fleming
#80. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.
Ian Fleming
#81. Bond swallowed. He looked over towards Vesper. Felix Leiter was again standing beside her. He grinned slightly and Bond smiled back and raised his hand from the table in a small gesture of benediction.
Ian Fleming
#82. Head of S., thought Bond. They're certainly giving me the red carpet treatment.
Ian Fleming
#83. You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
Ian Fleming
#84. Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'.
Ian Fleming
#85. A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.
Ian Fleming
#86. And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.
Ian Fleming
#87. 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.
Ian Fleming
#88. He saw her now only as a spy. Their love and his grief were relegated to the boxroom of his mind. Later, perhaps they would be dragged out, dispassionately examined, and then bitterly thrust back with other sentimental baggage he would rather forget.
Ian Fleming
#89. If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn't arrive.
Ian Fleming
#90. 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.
Ian Fleming
#91. He looked up at Mathis to see how bored he was getting with these introspective refinements of what, to Mathis, was a simple question of duty. Mathis smiled back at him.
Ian Fleming
#92. It's no good protecting people or even looking after them past a certain point. One can't grasp more than a piece of anyone. Most of the rest can only be protected by themselves and the remainder by hired specialists and doctors and dentists and professional protectors.
Ian Fleming
#93. 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.
Ian Fleming
#94. They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.
Ian Fleming
#95. I always make it a rule never to look back. Otherwise, I'd ask myself how I could write such piffle and live with myself, day after day.
Ian Fleming
#96. She has black hair, blue eyes, and splendid ... er ... protuberances. Back and front,' he added.
Ian Fleming
#97. She looked at him and saw that his nostrils were slightly flared. In other respects he seemed completely at ease, acknowledging cheerfully the greetings of the Casino functionaries.
Ian Fleming
#98. Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.
Ian Fleming
#99. Bond didn't defend the practice. He simply maintained that the more effort and ingenuity you put into gambling, the more you took out.
Ian Fleming
#100. Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.
Ian Fleming
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