Great Fleming Quotes

I thought it 'd be a good idea to make a collection of great Fleming quotes.

Here's this for starters, from Moonraker:

“And now what? wondered Bond. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure—the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. An exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.”

Control wrote:

I thought it 'd be a good idea to make a collection of great Fleming quotes.

Here's this for starters, from Moonraker:

“And now what? wondered Bond. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure—the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. An exit line. He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentiment. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.”

That's one of my favourites, but then I am SILHOUETTE MAN! :D

I'm just into OHMSS right now. I'm sure this tome will yield a few choice bits o' Fleming.

:)

'The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes'.

And thus was Our Hero 'born'. :)

"And then the bastards chose to fire off three more flares followed by a stream of miscellaneous rockets that burst prettily among the stars. Of course! Bright idea! This was for the sake of the watchers in the valley who might be inquisitive about the explosions high up the mountain. They were having a party up there, celebrating something. What fun these rich folk had, to be sure! And then Bond remembered. But of course! It was Christmas Eve! God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay! Bond's skis hissed an accompaniment as he zigzagged fast down the beautiful snow slope. White Christmas! Well, he'd certainly got himself that!"

Fleming used more exclamation points in OHMSS than in all his other works combined.

"Bond stubbed out his cigarette, gave a quick glance round their trysting place to fix its banality in his mind, and walked to the door, leaving the fragments of his old life torn up amidst the debris of an airport breakfast."

Reminds me a bit of the concluding sentence of Moonraker. Utterly poignant.

"How's the agoraphobia Goldfinger?"
No villain was subjected to the Bond acerbic wit worse than Goldfinger.
Bond got some good zingers in at Blofeld too in YOLT.
====One of the best from the films, is Connery asking No if toppling U.S. missles compensates for having no hands.

"He was already going like hell down the dark blue gutter! He tried breaking with the toes of both his boots. Damned little difference! What came first on the blasted run? There was this lateral straight curve across the shoulder of the mountain, then a big banked curve. He was into it now! Bond kept his right shoulder down and inched right on the steering arm. Even so, he went perilously near the top edge of the bank before he dived down into the dark gully again. What came next on that metal map? Why in hell hadn't he studied it more carefully? He got his answer! It looked like a straight, but the shadows camouflaged a sharp dip. Bond left the ground and flew. The crash of his landing almost knocked the wind out of his body. He frantically dug his toes into the ice. Managed to get down from perhaps fifty m.p.h. to forty. Well, well! So that was "Dead Man's Leap." What in hell was the next bit of murder? "Whiz-Bang Straight"! And by God it was!"

Nobody writes action better than Fleming, and this is a textbook example.

"Once the man raised his head and let out a single terrible scream, and Bond saw that his face was encrusted with pendant fish as if with silvery locks of hair."

God, what a sickening description! I have little doubt that Fleming could have written tremendous horror fiction had he chosen to do so.

"You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother’s womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world … Don’t lose faith in your stars."


"There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent. There are assignments on which he is required to act the part of a very rich man; occasions when he takes refuge in good living to efface the memory of danger and the shadow of death…"


Fleming was excellent at opening a novel.

The conclusion of YOLT--from Bond escaping the Castle of Death via balloon to the final words--is a tour de force. And it concludes some of Fleming's most beautiful, evocative prose.

"And that finished him. He knew it had! For now the whole black silhouette of the castle swayed in the moonlight and seemed to jig upwards and sideways and then slowly dissolve like an ice-cream cone in sunshine. The top story crumbled first, then the next, and the next, and then, after a moment, a huge jet of orange fire shot up from hell towards the moon."

That is a very Nabokovian descriptive passage.

Next:

"Below, the softly swelling sea offered a bed. Bond let go with hands and feet and plummeted down towards peace, towards the rippling feathers of some childhood dream of softness and escape from pain."

Those two sentences never fail to bring a lump to my throat.

Then the book's marvelous concluding sentence:

"And, compared with the blazing significance to him of that single Russian word on the scrap of paper, his life on Kuro, his love for Kissy Suzuki, were, in Tiger's phrase, of as little account as sparrows' tears."

Could we get this stickied?

My balls are empty.

I still have mod powers here, but no sticky option. That's up to Lazenby.

Perilagu Khan wrote:

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 and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population. His instinct told him, as it had told other travellers, that Istanbul was a town he would be glad to get out of alive.

That is a good one. Never been to the place, and this does not help.
Beautiful city, though. Judging from pictures.

Just don't go out at night, PC.

Istanbul is a tough town.

Largo's Shark wrote:

My balls are empty.

You've had your ... six?

trevanian wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

My balls are empty.

You've had your ... six?

Too much six by the sounds of it.

What continuation author can write like this? None, I bet.

Very few people, period, have been able to write like that. Fleming was a literary genius. They're a rare breed. Soon, I hope, not to be extinct.

I really like the MOONRAKER bit that starts by talking about miasma (thumbsucking) and concludes with " ... you great hairy-faced brute."

I actually filmed myself doing that whole speech back when I was 19 or 20. Man do I wish I still had that roll of film (disappeared along  with every frame of a nearly-complete THE PRISONER parody film I made the year before. Had a girlfriend for awhile who was supposed to be on anti-psychotic meds but wasn't taking them the whole time we were together -- found that out from her sister a month after I up and left her -- and sometimes she really went crazy. Some of my films fell prey to her, along with every paper draft and floppy drive version of my first feature-length spec script. Still pisses me off.)