Quotes from Ian Fleming

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 of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared

The bitch is dead now.

And don't get hurt,' [Dexter] added. 'There's no one to help you up there. And don't go stirring up a lot of trouble for us. This case isn't ripe yet. Until it is, our policy with Mr Big is 'live and let live'.' Bond looked quizzically at Captain Dexter In my job,' he said, 'when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It's 'live and let die'.

Prohibition is the trigger of crime.

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

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it.

Before a man's forty, girls cost nothing. After that you have to pay money, or tell a story. Of the two, it's the story that hurts most. Anyway I'm not forty yet.

Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due.

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

His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.

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.

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

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 never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.

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

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

You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.

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.

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

In their talk there was nothing but companionship with a distant undertone of passion. In the background there was the unspoken zest of the promise which, in due course and in their own time, would be met.

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 such a wonderful machine.

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.

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

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.

I've found that one must try and teach people that there's no top limit to disaster-that, so long as breath remains in your body, you've got accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition.