Ian Fleming Quotes

“Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.”
― Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

“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.”
― Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

“I have discussed this with him and he points out that the Rolex Oyster Perpetual weighs about six ounces and would appreciably slow up the use of his left hand in combat. His practice, in fact, is to use fairly cheap, expendable wrist watches on expanding metal bracelets which can be slipped forward over the thumb and used in the form of a knuckle-duster, either on the outside or the inside of the hand.”
― Ian Fleming

“To Fleming, and to his readers, James Bond was a real person living in the modern world. The details of his life appear only sporadically in the books, but they proved vitally important in grounding him in his time, which made his extraordinary and often implausible adventures seem possible.”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation

“Ian Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He ... was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with the usual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that encapsulated the aspirations of the age, and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself. He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created .... Ian Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it .... To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality.”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation

“... so much of James Bond was Ian Fleming himself. Ian was never able to write about anything he did not know, or any place he had not been. James Bond had been around for a long time -- as long, in fact, as Ian Fleming had been dreaming himself into fantasy situations. When he finally emerged on paper, 007 was a toughened-up younger-brother version of Ian himself: more straightforward, less interesting, the kind of young hothead Ian might have been had he not valued power above adventure.”
― Henry Chancellor, James Bond: The Man and His World, the Official Companion to Ian Fleming's Creation

“it's all right", he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. "It's quite all right. She's having a rest. We'll be going soon. There's no hurry. You see -"
Bond's head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair - "you see, we've got all the time in the world".”
― Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service

“Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“In those early novels, Fleming informs us that Bond feels ‘he must play the role… expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.’ To those who have marveled at his adventures during the last half-century, James Bond is far more substantial than a mere silhouette. His is the body through which we realize and interpret our greatest fears and desires.”
― Brian A. Dixon, Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast