Ian Fleming Quotes

He could not just wear a watch. It had to be a Rolex.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

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.

Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it.

A gentleman's choice of timepiece says as much about him as does his Saville Row suit.

You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.

History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.

Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due

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.

He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.

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.

A medium Vodka dry Martini - with a slice of lemon peel. Shaken and not stirred.

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.

Bond didn't defend the practice. He simply maintained that the more effort and ingenuity you put into gambling, the more you took out.

The gain to the winner is always less than the loss to the loser.

Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.

If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn't arrive.

Against the background of this luminous and sparkling stage Bond stood in the sunshine and felt his mission to be incongruous and remote and his dark profession an affront to his fellow actors.

I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.

It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.

Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.

Never say 'no' to adventures.

Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.

Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.

Diamonds are forever.

There is only one recipe for a best seller and it is a very simple one. You have to get the reader to turn over the page.

It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.

Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.

I have always smoked and drunk and loved too much. In fact I have lived not too long but too much. One day the Iron Crab will get me. Then I shall have died of living too much.

The World Is Not Enough

At gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.

They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.

Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

It reads better than it lives

He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.

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.

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

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.

My mental hands were empty, and I felt I must do something as a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43.

Mine’s Bond – James Bond.

A woman can put up with almost anything; anything but indifference.

Shaken and not stirred.

A woman should be an illusion

Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.