Quote

Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them. When one gets there the result is unrewarding, but the process is instructive and entertaining.

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
Like
Chinese
Instructive
Result
Nest
Gets
Nests
Takes
Englishmen
Results
Centre
Process
Odd
Long
Entertaining
Time
Boxes

More quotes by Ian Fleming

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Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.
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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 am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.
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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.
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Most marriages don't add two people together. They subtract one from the other.
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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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It reads better than it lives
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As for sex, well, I mean sex is a perfectly respectable subject as far as Shakespeare is concerned. I mean, all history is love and violence.
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If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn't arrive.
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A woman should be an illusion
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Never job backwards. What might have been was a waste of time.
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He could not just wear a watch. It had to be a Rolex.
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Older women are best because they always think they may be doing it for the last time.
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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 can put up with almost anything anything but indifference.
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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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And people with obsessions, reflected Bond, were blind to danger.
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History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
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When I wrote the first [Bond novel] in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard.
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The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
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If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.
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