Quotes by Ian Fleming

“Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and f...”

“From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence t...”

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success”

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

“Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.”

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

“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 sta...”

“The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.”

“Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.”

“Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.”

“History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”

“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 ne...”

“Above all, he liked it that everything was one's own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage o...”

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

“Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.”

“As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not ...”

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

“Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”

“When the odds are hopeless, when all seems to be lost, then is the time to be calm, to make a show of authority at least of indifference”

“And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.”