Quote

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.

Ian Fleming

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Ian Fleming
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: December 28
Died: 1964
Died: August 12
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Prosaist
Sailor
Screenwriter
Writer
Mayfair
London
Ian Lancaster Fleming
Tell
Forty
Money
Anyway
Two
Girls
Stories
Cost
Nothing
Pay
Men
Hurt
Story
Girl
Hurts

More quotes by Ian Fleming

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My mental hands were empty, and I felt I must do something as a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of 43.
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People do connect me with James Bond simply because I happen to like scrambled eggs and short-sleeved shirts and some of the things that James Bond does, but I certainly haven't got his guts nor his very lively appetites.
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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
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As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.
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A woman should be an illusion
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One of the bibles of my youth was 'Birds of the West Indies,' by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, 'My God, that's the dullest name I've ever heard,' so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one.
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You only live twice. Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.
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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.
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If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn't arrive.
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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.
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...Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
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Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it.
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Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.
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I don't regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way.
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Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.
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Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.
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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 to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck.
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I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.
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These blithering women who thought they could do a man's work. Why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men's work to the men.
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And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.
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