“Outside the bus the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a horrible smell, from somewhere down in the stomach of the world.”— Ian Fleming
“Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”— Ian Fleming
“Each dark conjecture came and for a moment settled like a vulture on Bond’s shoulder and croaked into his ear that he had been a blind fool.”— Ian Fleming
“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
“From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.”— Ian Fleming
“Now that little problem of yours, this business of not knowing good men from bad men and villains from heroes and so forth…There’s still plenty for you to do. And you’ll do it. And when you fall in love and have a mistress or a wife and children to look after, it will all seem easier.” He opened the door but stopped on the threshold. “Surround yourself with human beings, my dear. They are easier to fight for than principles.” He laughed. “But don’t let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine.” With a wave of his hand he shut the door.”— Ian Fleming
“There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. All we have is the living example of people who are least good, or our own intuition.”— Ian Fleming
“Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple – or dead.”— Ian Fleming
“In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.”— Ian Fleming
“Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”— Ian Fleming
“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
“My dear boy’, Le Chiffre spoke like a father, ‘the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups and you have already found it a painful experience. You are not equipped, my dear boy, to play games with adults and it very foolish of your nanny in London to have sent you out here with your spade and bucket. Very foolish indeed and most unfortunate for you.”But we must stop joking, my dear fellow, although I am sure you would like to follow me in developing this amusing little cautionary tale.”— Ian Fleming
“He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out those reserves again, how the will to live would spring up again in a real emergency. He remembered how countless neurotic patients had disappeared for ever from his consulting rooms when the last war had broken out. The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser. He made up his mind. He turned back to M. “Give him one more chance.”— Ian Fleming
“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
“But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. ‘This Man Died from Living Too Much’.”— Ian Fleming
“You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.”— Ian Fleming
“For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.”— Ian Fleming
“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
“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.”— Ian Fleming