Ian Fleming Quotes

'License to Kill' is not one of the great Bond movies.

I don't think anyone has ever succeeded in putting Ian Fleming's James Bond up on the screen. The closest in my opinion is Pierce Brosnan.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

Charles Kiss is a legendary James Bond-style British spy. And McGrath is the young idealist who is given the task of following in his footsteps. It's a mission that forces McGrath to question everything he thought he believed in.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I cannot even remember a time before being conscious of James Bond.

There was no actual person who was James Bond, despite all the books.

I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.

Before Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent.

I tend to come up with people more than situations - most of my books start with a character.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

And he said that he wrote the Bond character based on the character of David Niven. That's how he saw Bond.

Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances?

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

I've always loved the Bond films.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I've always loved them because of that.

The only club I have ever belonged to is the James Bond fan club. Member since 1979.

The first Bond movie I saw at cinemas was 'For Your Eyes Only' when I was almost 10. I got into the Fleming books after watching 'A View To A Kill' a few years later.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.