Best Ian Fleming Quotes & Sayings

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face — Ian Fleming

She seemed to Bond to give a quick involuntary shrug of the shoulders as she spoke, but then she leant impulsively towards him. 'I have some news for you from Mathis. He was longing to tell you himself. It's about the bomb. It's a fantastic story. — Ian Fleming

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

Shooting hell out of a piece of cardboard doesn't prove anything' was his single-line introduction to the Small-arms Defence Manual. — Ian Fleming

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition. — Ian Fleming

It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera. — Ian Fleming

In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him. — Ian Fleming

What a man! He certainly seems to have the run of this country. Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest. Glad we haven't got him on our hands in England. — Ian Fleming

Bond had taken her to the station and had kissed her once hard on the lips and had gone away. It hadn't been love, but a quotation had come into Bond's mind as his cab moved out of Pennsylvania station: 'Some love is fire, some love is rust. But the finest, cleanest love is lust. — 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

power is the goal of all ambition, — Ian Fleming

How soon Mathis had been proved right and how soon his own little sophistries had been exploded in his face! — 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 foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite 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

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

Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it. — 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

Bond closed his eyes and mentally explored his body. The worst pain was in his wrists and ankles and in his right hand where the Russian had cut him. In the centre of the body there was no feeling. He assumed that he had been given a local anaesthetic. The rest of his body ached dully as if he had been beaten all over. He could feel the pressure of bandages everywhere and his unshaven neck and chin prickled against the sheets. From the feel of the bristles he knew that he must have been at least three days without shaving. That meant two days since the morning of the torture. — Ian Fleming

I don't regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way. — Ian Fleming

Garch a har?" -Oddjob, Goldfinger — Ian Fleming

I'm behaving like a pig,' she said happily. 'You always give me all the things I like best. I've never been so spoiled before.' She gazed across the terrace at the moonlit bay. 'I wish I deserved it.' Her voice had a wry undertone. 'What do you mean?' asked Bond surprised. 'Oh, I don't know. I suppose people get what they deserve, so perhaps I do deserve it.' She looked at him and smiled. Her eyes narrowed quizzically. 'You really don't know much about me,' she said suddenly. Bond was surprised by the undertone of seriousness in her voice. — 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

Three measures of Gordon's, 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. — Ian Fleming

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God. — Ian Fleming

There was no sign of life round the domed emplacement of the Moonraker, and the concrete, already beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun, stretched emptily away towards Deal. It looked like a newly laid aerodome or rather, he thought, with its three disparate concrete 'things', the beehive dome,the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the early sun, like a Dali desert landscape in which three objets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random. — Ian Fleming

He suddenly dropped his bantering tone and looked at Bond sharply and venomously. — Ian Fleming

Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold. — Ian Fleming

So much of James Bond was Ian Fleming himself. Ian was never able to write about anything he did not know, or any place he had not been. James Bond had been around for a long time
as long, in fact, as Ian Fleming had been dreaming himself into fantasy situations. When he finally emerged on paper, 007 was a toughened-up younger-brother version of Ian himself: more straightforward, less interesting, the kind of young hothead Ian might have been had he not valued power above adventure. — Henry Chancellor

During the next two days James Bond was permanently in this state without regaining consciousness. He watched the procession of his dreams go by without any effort to disturb their sequence, although many of them were terrifying and all were painful. He knew that he was in a bed and that he was lying on his back and could not move and in one of his twilight moments he thought there were people round him, but he made no effort to open his eyes and re-enter the world. He felt safer in the darkness and he hugged it to him. — Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming was my cousin, you know. He was in naval intelligence. — Christopher Lee

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

My mental hands were empty, and I felt I must do something as a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43. — 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

I hate Nassau and the Bahamas. It's one of those places I'd always wanted to visit since reading Ian Fleming but it was full of casinos with Americans in shorts. — Tony Parsons

He could not just wear a watch. It had to be a Rolex. — Ian Fleming

Bond smelt the smell of danger. — Ian Fleming

He put down the receiver and looked vaguely at the paper in his hand. It was a rough piece of white wrapping paper. Scrawled in pencil in ragged block letters were the words:
HE DISAGREED WITH SOMETHING THAT ATE HIM
And underneath in brackets:
(P.S. WE HAVE PLENTY MORE JOKES AS GOOD AS THIS) — Ian Fleming

Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles. — Ian Fleming

Mistress Agatha Brown, she was Church of England, but she just done gone to the Catholics. And it seems they don't hold with places like 3½, not even when they're decently run. — Ian Fleming