Ian Fleming

“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 DexterIn my job,' he said, 'when I come up against a man like this one, I have another motto. It's 'live and let die'.”

“Hm,' said Bond. 'Bogeyman stuff.”

“Mine’s Bond – James Bond.”

“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.”

“Bond always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big - bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. Napoleon had been short, and Hitler. It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”

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

“Oh, it's all been such a lark.”

“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.”

“Never say 'no' to adventures.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.”

“Unfortunately most ways of making big money take a long time. By the time one has made the money one is too old to enjoy it.”

“Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?”

“It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”

“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.”

“People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've 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.”

“Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.”

“Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.”

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

“Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.”

“He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession.”

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

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

“Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'.”