Ian Fleming Quotes

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ 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

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

~ Ian Fleming

Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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.

~ 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

~ Ian Fleming

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.

~ Ian Fleming

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.

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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

~ Ian Fleming

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 knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.

~ Ian Fleming