Quotes by 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.”

“Men want a woman whom they can turn on and off like a light switch.”

“I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.”

“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.”

“Im looking for Commander James Bond, not an overgrown stunt man. [on meeting Sean Connery]”

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

“A medium Vodka dry Martini - with a slice of lemon peel. Shaken and not stirred.”

“To celebrate the centenary of Ian Flemings birth in 2008 we are looking at a wide range of different activities and one of those is a new adult Bond novel,”

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

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

You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face

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.

He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure---the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.

If you fail at the large things it means you have not large ambitions. Concentration, focus - that is all. The aptitudes come, the tools forge themselves.

People are islands, she said. They dont really touch. However close they are, theyre really quite separate. Even if theyve been married for fifty years.

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.

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.

I think its the same with all the relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesnt care if the other is alive or dead, then its just no good.-- from Quantum of Solace

Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings.

You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.