Ian Fleming Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul erosion produced by high gambling — a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension — becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

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

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
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.

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
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
The licence to kill for the Secret Service, the double-0 prefix, was a great honour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Fleming
'I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It come partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It's very pernickety and oldmaidish really, but then when I'm working I generally have to eat my meals alone and it makes them more interesting when one takes trouble.'

Ian Fleming
And then one day when you're playing your little game you'll suddenly find yourself pinned down like a butterfly.

Ian Fleming