“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
“Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.”
— Ian Fleming
“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”
— 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
“A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.”
— 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
“Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.”
— 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
“Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.”
— Ian Fleming
“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.”
— Ian Fleming
“Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.”
— Ian Fleming
“His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.”
— Ian Fleming
“You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.”
— Ian Fleming
“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
“I think it’s the same with all the relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn’t care if the other is alive or dead, then it’s just no good.– from Quantum of Solace”
— Ian Fleming
“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
“The conventional parabola–sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness–was to him shameful and hypocritical.”
— Ian Fleming
“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.”
— Ian Fleming
“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
“He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure—the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.”
— Ian Fleming
“I would stay away from him and leave him to go his own road where there would be other women, countless other women, who would probably give him as much physical pleasure as he had had with me. I wouldn’t care, or at least I told myself that I wouldn’t care, because none of them would ever own him—own any larger piece of him than I now did.”
— Ian Fleming
“You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face”
— Ian Fleming