You only live twice:Once when you are bornAnd once when you look death in the face
He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure—the pain that is so much greater than the pleasure of success.
If you fail at the large things it means you have not large ambitions. Concentration, focus – that is all. The aptitudes come, the tools forge themselves.
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.
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.
Bond sat for a moment frozen to his chair. Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into his mind that most sinister line in poetry: ‘They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings.
You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.
His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.
Most marriages don’t add two people together. They subtract one from the other.
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.
Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.
All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken.It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.
She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well she found me in the mountains and she was raped – by me.
Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.
A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.
It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.
Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.
Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim’s head or Bond’s brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness.
Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.
Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple – or dead.
Who is this man?”Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No – Doctor Julius No.”No? Spelt like Yes?”That’s right.
Each dark conjecture came and for a moment settled like a vulture on Bond’s shoulder and croaked into his ear that he had been a blind fool.
In angry protest the red telephone splintered the silence.
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success
Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.
Outside the bus the smell of sulphur hit Bond with sickening force. It was a horrible smell, from somewhere down in the stomach of the world.
They want us dead,’ said Bond calmly. ‘So we have to stay alive.
Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due.
…Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond’s natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.
Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.
The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.
History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
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.
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.
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
And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.
You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.
Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.