Ian Fleming Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

Ian Fleming
Some women respond to the whip, some to the kiss. Most of them like a mixture of both, but none of them answer to the mind alone, to the intellectual demand, unless they are man dressed as woman.

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
A horse is dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle.

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
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.

Ian Fleming
It was the same with the whole Russian machine. Fear was the impulse. For them it was always safer to advance than retreat. Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray and the bullet would never miss.

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

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

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
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
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
Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?

Ian Fleming
He thought with pleasure of the In-tray piled with Top Secret dockets he had gladly abandoned when the red telephone had summoned him an hour before. He felt fairly confident that now he wouldn't have to deal with them.

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

Ian Fleming
And I would like a medium Vodka dry Martini — with a slice of lemon peel. Shaken and not stirred, please. I would prefer Russian or Polish vodka.

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

Ian Fleming
Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.

Ian Fleming
Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which I foolishly helped to destroy, he was creating a normal of badness by which, and by which alone, an oppostie norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.

Ian Fleming
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.

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