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.

For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence...

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.

I’ve found that one must try and teach people that there’s no top limit to disaster-that, so long as breath remains in your body, you’ve got accept the miseries of life. They will often seem...

Prohibition is the trigger of crime.

His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.

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

He had seen how the spirit, the reserves in [Bond], could pull him out of badly damaged conditions that would have broken the normal human being. He knew how a desperate situation would bring out...

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she...

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

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.

Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.

Everyone has the revolver of resignation in his pocket.

Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again.

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle...

You only live twice:Once when you’re bornAnd once when you look death in the face.

They want us dead,’ said Bond calmly. ‘So we have to stay alive.

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.

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

In angry protest the red telephone splintered the silence.

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.

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.

I am a poet in deeds–not often in words.

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

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.

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...

Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.

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

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

But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I...

You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.

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

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

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...

My dear boy’, Le Chiffre spoke like a father, ‘the game of Red Indians is over, quite over. You have stumbled by mischance into a game for grown-ups and you have already found it a...

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.

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

You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy.

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...

Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.

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.

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.

There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about how to be evil and how to be bad. The Devil had no prophets to...

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...

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.

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...

From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood...