About James Bond (film series) quotes

View Quote I felt I was caught in a time warp between Roger and Sean. It was a very hard one to grasp the meaning of, for me. The violence was never real, the brute force of the man was never palpable. It was quite tame, and the characterisation didn’t have a follow-through of reality, it was surface.

View Quote Pierce Brosnan, "Pierce Brosnan: 'I was never good enough as Bond'" Hannah Furness, The Telegraph, (12 Apr 2014).

View Quote The only real difficulty I found in playing Bond was that I had to start from scratch. Nobody knew anything about him, after all. Not even Fleming. Does he have parents? Where does he come from? Nobody knows. But we played it for laughs, and people seem to feel it comes off quite well.

View Quote Sean Connery, Sydney Morning Herald, (1963); as quoted in "Sean Connery On James Bond", Stuff Nobody Cares About.

View Quote Yes, I do identify with him. I too enjoy drinking, women, eating the physical pleasure – smells and tastes living by my senses, being alive. And as far as Bond is concerned, he has no past.

View Quote Sean Connery in Elizabeth Trotta, Newsday, (1963) as quoted in "Sean Connery On James Bond", Stuff Nobody Cares About.

View Quote Bond makes his own rules, and that’s fine as long as you’re not plagued by doubts. But if you are—and most of us are—you’re sunk. That’s why Bond is so attrac­tive to women. By their na­ture they’re indecisive, so a man who is absolutely sure comes as a godsend.

View Quote Sean Connery in Anthony Carthew, New York Times, (1964); as quoted in "Sean Connery On James Bond", Stuff Nobody Cares About.

View Quote Hitherto, whenever I’ve tangled with a beautiful spy, have you noticed what in­variably happens? Even if I know the girl is a nasty and dangerous little snake, I’ve still had to kiss her first and kill her later. That’s the persona Ian Fleming and the film producers built up for me as James Bond. Every time I see a girl, I have to give. One of my producers, Cubby Broccoli, said to me: ‘It’s like this, Sean. James Bond is a nut for girls. Even if he hates her, his amor­ous instincts die hard – and she dies soft see?

View Quote Sean Connery in Leonard Mosley, New York Times, (1964), as quoted in "Sean Connery On James Bond", Stuff Nobody Cares About.

View Quote He (Bond) is really a mixture of all that the defenders and the attackers say he is. When I spoke about Bond with (Bond creator, Ian) Fleming, he said that when the character was conceived, Bond was a very simple, straightforward, blunt instrument of the police force, a functionary who would carry out his job rather doggedly. But he also had a lot of idiosyncrasies that were considered snobbish–such as a taste for special wines, et cetera. But if you take Bond in the situations that he is constantly involved with, you see that it is a very hard, high, unusual league that he plays in. Therefore he is quite right in having all his senses satisfied–be it sex, wine, food or clothes–because the job, and he with it, may terminate at any minute. But the virtues that (Kingsley) Amis mentions–loyalty, honesty–are there, too. Bond doesn’t chase married women, for instance. Judged on that level, he comes out rather well.

View Quote Sean Connery in Playboy, (1965); as quoted in "Sean Connery On James Bond", Stuff Nobody Cares About.

View Quote “Immoral? I’ve never seen him steal anyone’s wife, anyone else’s woman, or betray his own; he doesn’t have one. He likes women all right, but he never rapes them; it’s they who worm their way into his bed. He kills people, he has to; if he doesn’t, they’ll kill him. He abides by no laws, but nor is he protected by the laws that protect others; society does nothing to defend him, he isn’t known to society. He’s rather ignorant, O.K., but he doesn’t exactly have the time for reading Joyce. His struggle for survival obliges him to be practical, functional, to reduce everything to the verbs sniff, look, listen, taste, think. His safety depends on this and not on Joyce. He doesn’t fight for old people and children, but who said he couldn’t? Have you any proof? Your accusations wouldn’t be valid in any court of law. Yes, sure, it would be interesting if I spoke badly of Bond. But I’ve got nothing at all against Mr. Bond, and I’m only too sorry he has to die.”

View Quote Sean Connery in Oriana Fallaci, interview in Paris, (1965); as quoted in "Sean Connery On James Bond", Stuff Nobody Cares About.

View Quote With James Bond, people are sure there's gonna be a bit of sex, a bit of fun, a bit of action, a bit of drama and it's gonna be a bit of a joyride. My personal choice is From Russia With Love because that's got all the glamour and the locations and the twists and the humor and rather good storytelling, and places like Istanbul. The Bond pictures will continue on, I suppose.

View Quote Sean Connery "Connery's take on life in the movies", Rogerebert.com, (Dec 25th 2000).

View Quote I feel that Roger - which I think he may have inherited in part from after Diamonds Are Forever, where they were already getting into that area of too much hardware - that that was more important.

View Quote His is a sort of parody of the character, as it were, so you would go for the laugh or the humour at whatever the cost of the credibility or the reality. I think that's basically the difference.

View Quote Sean Connery, (1983); as quoted in "Roger Moore dead: Revisting Sean Connery's brutal critique of actor's James Bond portrayal" Independent, (23 May 2017).

View Quote He’s very ****ing lonely. There’s a great sadness. He’s ****ing these beautiful women but then they leave and it’s … sad. And as a man gets older it’s not a good look. It might be a nice fantasy – that’s debatable – but the reality, after a couple of months …

View Quote Hopefully, my Bond is not as sexist and misogynistic as [earlier incarnations].

View Quote Daniel Craig, "Daniel Craig: James Bond less 'sexist' than before" by Benjamin Lee, The Guardian, (1, Sep 2015).

View Quote I think Roger was fine as Bond, but the films had become too much techno-pop and had lost track of their sense of story. I mean, every film seemed to have a villain who had to rule or destroy the world. If you want to believe in the fantasy on screen, then you have to believe in the characters and use them as a stepping-stone to lead you into this fantasy world. That's a demand I made, and Albert Broccoli agreed with me.

View Quote Timothy Dalton in "Celebrating Timothy Dalton’s James Bond" by Mark Harrison, Den of Geek, (Oct 29, 2012).

View Quote The real hidden gem of the Bond series’ financials lies in the marketing sponsorships it generates. Every major brand—Omega watches, Gillette shavers, Belvedere vodka, Heineken beer—wants to be associated with 007’s prestige. Jacques de ****, a marketing consultant and lecturer at the London School of Marketing, estimates that the franchise has earned between $4 billion and $5 billion in marketing sponsorships since 1962’s Dr. No. If we’re working from the high end of that projection, that amounts to roughly $208 million per film. For perspective, Skyfall‘s entire production budget was $200 million. But that sponsorship money is going to the production companies, not the distributor. Still, that means the cost of each film is practically covered, and then some, long before the actual movie arrives in theaters. For that reason, the James Bond series may never end (there was even talk about a small-screen spin-off when Apple and Amazon were vying for the rights). These days, Hollywood is built on repetitive cash flow (i.e., sequels), but unlike the Star Wars or Harry Potter films—which earn more on average picture by picture, but only run for eight or nine installments—Bond is set up to live on ad infinitum.

View Quote Brandon Katz, “Is the James Bond Franchise Actually a Moneymaker?”, The Observer, (01/21/19)

View Quote I mean the reasons that I wanted to be Bond were simple. I looked up to Sean Connery as an actor, and I thought that I would get laid a lot more. The strange thing is it actually had the opposite effect. Short hair and suits didn’t get you laid in the late 1960s. Everyone was wearing bell-bottoms.

View Quote George Lazenby, "George Lazenby on How Becoming James Bond Changed His Life" by Charles Thorp, Mens Journal.

View Quote I tend to forget that I even played James Bond until somebody reminds me. But I am glad I got to share the story.

View Quote George Lazenby, "George Lazenby on How Becoming James Bond Changed His Life" by Charles Thorp, Mens Journal.

View Quote I wouldn’t have changed it from the way I played it. I played it slightly tongue-in-cheek because I never quite believed that James Bond was a spy because everybody knew him, they all knew what he drank. He’d walk into a bar and it would always be, 'Ah, Commander Bond, martini, shaken not stirred.’ Spies are faceless people.

View Quote Roger Moore in “Roger Moore interview: 'I was never very confident with girls'” by Tim Auld, The Telegraph, 23 May 2017.

View Quote "Bond isn't going to be downing three or four martinis, and then winning a fight with five guys," Swartzwelder tells Shots. "He might be starting the fights, but he's not winning them." The old saw that every drink kills lots of brain cells isn't true, Swartzwelder says. "But chronic drinking does damage neurons and brain circuits over time," he says. "And there are parts of the brain that you don't want to damage if you're an international spy." First off, chronic alcohol abuse can injure the cerebellum, the brain region involved with coordination, Swartzwelder says. "It allows you to string together a series of athletic movements." "If Bond is pickling his cerebellum on a regular basis, he's not going to be able to learn fight sequences, jump through windows and shoot at the same time or even learn those dance sequences with his girlfriend," he says. The second brain region damaged by years of heavy drinking is the hippocampus, Swartzwelder says. Shaped like a little sea horse, the hippocampus is dedicated to forming new memories. "It is very sensitive to the effects of alcohol," he says. "Bond wouldn't be able to remember all those names, card numbers at poker games or even all his girlfriends' phones numbers if his hippocampus wasn't working correctly. "Believe me," Swartzwelder says. "Bond wouldn't have been doing the things that we he was doing in those movies if he drank as much as the study found."

View Quote Scott Schwartzwelder as qtd. in Michaeleen Doucleff, “If You Drank Like James Bond, You'd Be Shaken, Too”, All Things Considered, NPR, (December 12, 2013).

View Quote James Bond was established by Ian Fleming as a white character, played by white actors. Play 003 or 006, but you cannot be 007. A lot of people say we should be allowed to play everything. Don’t be ridiculous. If I say I want to play JFK, I should be laughed out of the room.

View Quote Yaphet Kotto, "Former 007 villain Yaphet Kotto says James Bond cannot be black", Ben Child, The Guardian, (8 April 2015).