Quotes from Ian Fleming

They had a table near the rail round the huge floor. Bond was spellbound. He found many of the girls very beautiful. The music hammered its way into his pulse until he almost forgot what he was there for.

I was just running away from the person I'd been for the past five years. I wasn't particularly pleased with the person I was now, but I had hated and despised the other one, and I was glad to be rid of her face.

It was one of those Septembers when it seemed that the summer would never end.

Bond looked at the beautiful day and smiled. And no man, not even Mr. Big, would have liked the expression on his face.

clean-shaven and dressed in the conventional disguise with which Brooks Brothers cover the shame of American millionaires.

Only law firm out there's called Smith and Wesson.

I should spend the money quickly, Commander Bond.

There had been something very disquieting about the dinner-table downstairs. It had been laid for only three people.

Each day the atmosphere became more hateful. It seemed fantastic to Bond that human relationships could collapse into dust overnight and he searched his mind again and again for a reason.

He saw her now only as a spy. Their love and his grief were relegated to the boxroom of his mind. Later, perhaps they would be dragged out, dispassionately examined, and then bitterly thrust back with other sentimental baggage he would rather forget.

Don't lose faith in your stars.

Bond frowned. 'It's not difficult to get a Double O number if you're prepared to kill people,' he said. 'That's all the meaning it has. It's nothing to be particularly proud of.

The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service.

Bond liked fast cars and he liked driving them. Most American cars bored him. They lacked personality and the patina of individual craftsmanship that European cars have.

In the background there thudded always the hidden metronome of the Casino, ticking up its little treasure of one-per-cents with each spin of a wheel and each turn of a card – a pulsing fat-cat with a zero for a heart.

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

A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.

Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses

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.

Because people are very careful with the secrets of their own business doesn't mean that they'll be careful with the secrets of yours.

I like doing everything fully, getting the most out of everything one does. I think that's the way to live.

In angry protest the red telephone splintered the silence.

Garch ahar?

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.