Ian Fleming Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

Ian Fleming
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action.

Ian Fleming
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

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
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. But he was honest enough to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.

Ian Fleming
Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.

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

Ian Fleming
Bond insisted ordering Leiter's Haig-and-Haig "on the rocks" and then he looked carefully at the barman. "A Dry Martini", he said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet." "Oui, monsieur." "Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, 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?" "Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

Ian Fleming
He sat down next door in the seat she had left and watched the grim suburbs of Philadelphia showing their sores, like beggars, to the rich train.

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
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
"Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles." He laughed. "But don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose a wonderful machine."

Ian Fleming
Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.

Ian Fleming
You are right, Mr. Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania that drives them towards their goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders — all maniacs.

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

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

Ian Fleming
The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one is the same difference between a beautiful and a plain woman - a matter of millimetres.

Ian Fleming
But some motorcars — mine, for instance, and perhaps yours — are different. If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don't scratch their paint and bang their doors, if you fill them up and pump them up when they need it, of you keep them clean and polish and out the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you MAY find, that they become almost like persons — MORE than just ordinary persons — MAGICAL PERSONS!!!

Ian Fleming
It was a dark, clean-cut face, with a three-inch scar showing whitely down the sunburned skin of the right cheek. The eyes were wide and level under straight, rather long black brows. The hair was black, parted on the left, and carelessly brushed so that a thick black comma fell down over the right eyebrow. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn but cruel mouth. The line of jaw was straight and firm. A section of dark suit, white shirt and black knitted tie completed the picture.

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

Ian Fleming
It was domination by a beauty so pure that it held a kind of truth, a divine authority before which all other material things turned, like the bit of quartz, to clay. In these few minutes Bond understood the myth of diamonds, and he knew that he would never forget what he had suddenly seen inside the heart of this stone.

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

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

Ian Fleming
I'm getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don't give the poor chap a chance...the Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography.

Ian Fleming
These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men.

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

Ian Fleming
Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.'

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

Ian Fleming