JAMES BOND: QUOTINO ROYALE
over 4000 biographical quotations
about the world's favourite secret agent.
"With Bond we are back in barbarism. If one met him, he would be a sinister bore. The Bond cult suggests our age may not be as modern as we like to think."
"Bond is a quite unashamed cad when it comes to love and women. This may not be admirable, but his accomplishments are."
"Bond could be seen as a modern embodiment of the agonistic spirit, of Nietzsche's assertion that the cruelty of victory is the pinnacle of life's jubilation."
"007 - who is sufficiently complicated to compel our interest over a whole series of adventures. A patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish Puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind, he is pitted against impossible villains, enemies of democracy, megalomaniacs."
"Mr. Fleming equipped his hero with an impeccable social background, good looks, bravery, toughness and a disillusioned sort of patriotism."
"Neither Mr. Fleming nor his hero shares the twentieth-century characteristic vice of cant. They are both carnivorous to the back-teeth and like their meat well hung. This, coming in the age of the murderous vegetarian, is rather pleasant than otherwise. For myself I am inclined to wish Bond many years and quick promotion in the order of St. Michael and St. George. I feel quite sure Mr. Fleming is too."
"Bond is perhaps the last world policeman the English will ever know. He hunts the enemy in New York, Haiti, Turkey, South Africa, France, Belgrade. Wherever peace and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon people is threatened, the arm of British justice reaches out and Bond is its fist ... Bond is Sir Francis Drake, Cecil Rhodes, and the Duke of Wellington, combined in a twentieth-century, post-concentration camp type of vigilante and hes a powerful chimera."
"Even by British standards, hard-boiled, hard-drinking Bond is a pukka cad who divides his time between bedding beautiful women, downing four-star meals and killing counter-bounders, all with the same cool, clinical skill."
"In crime or spy fantasies the interest is partly a fairy-tale one, good versus bad in a rather basic way. James Bond would not mean so much to us if we were unable to feel that he was on the right side and that his cause was just. The roughies have no decent cause. Self-interest is all."
"Whatever Brand X critics may have written, Bond isn't just an Organization Man, but a rigid jingoist, almost loveably archaic. "
"Bond is as authentic an article of the sixties as Fred Astaire was of the thirties, and the issue of quality hardly seems germane."
"Like Ulysses, he travels far ... He makes the obligatory trip to the underworld when he skin-dives in the Bahamas, travels through the sewers of Istanbul, visits the domain of Mr. Big in Harlem, negotiates Dr. No's cruel tunnel of terror ... He lives the dreams of countless drab people, his gun ready, his honour intact, his morals loose: the hero of our anxiety-ridden, mythless age."
"At a time when everything is being either inflated or devalued it's comforting to know that at least one commodity maintains its hard currency. That's James Bond, who, by all rights, should be an antique, as emblematic of the sixties as the Beatles and flower power, but who goes blithely on as if time has had a stop."
"Some critics might say that Bond is nothing more than an actor in the movies. But then, we've all got to start somewhere ... As I see it, 007 is really a 10 - our modern day version of the great heroes who appeared from time to time throughout history ... put their lives on the line for the cause of good."
"In its Connery years, Bond comprised equal parts of Jack Kennedy's playboy glamour and Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy."
"The huge popularity of the novels defined the character of Bond as the quintessential spy. His enigmatic side, his physical endurance, and his abilities as a lover became standards by which to judge all superspies. To today's reader, or rereader, he seems almost a cliché."
"On the home front, Bond was a nasty clubland version of the angry young men, an amoral nihilist who found solace in snobbery and violence. In some respects, the critics were right; one of Ian's enduring strengths was his ability, almost in spite of himself, to reflect what was really going on."
"Bond was the he-man idol for the anti-nostalgic 60s: he had no hypocrisy or piety in his patriotism. He touched on the youth audiences' secret fears that their dream world of peace and love ignored such atavistic and eternal drives as sexual and political conquest. By the 70s, Bond either worried or amused the most rabid kids, and either turned on or comforted their parents."
"James Bond is a literary brand name par excellence, a guarantee of a distinctive and reliable kind of armchair experience. An important part of Fleming's grip, of course, depends on 007, the suave and cruelly handsome Englishman (named after a distinguished ornithologist), a knife-thrower whose vices included drink ... and women, but that's not the whole story ... Bond is a snobbish, shallow-minded chauvinist with sado-masochistic inclinations."
"Bond's very indestructibility becomes annoying - what is the point of all this violence if you know that the hero is always going to be saved by a well-placed cigarette case or the sudden arrival of Felix Leiter? Bond comes back from the grave with wearying predictability."
"Fleming's literary Bond was even more out of kilter with the spirit of the age. He was a square, a man out of time. He hated the modern world of pop music and long-haired youths; he was fighting for a lost England."
To receive advanced notification of Quotino Royale's publication - scheduled for the second half of 2011 - please register your interest via Blue Eyed Books Email
Check out our first 007 Quotes Book - James Bond: Licence To Quote at Blue Eyed Books
over 4000 biographical quotations
about the world's favourite secret agent.
[ISBN: 9781907338144]
THE QUOTABLE BOND
THE QUOTABLE BOND
QUOTINO ROYALE is the more serious, encyclopedic counterpart to the light-hearted License To Quote book.
Containing over 4000 general quotations about Bond, his books, his films, his creators, etc, etc., this book looks at the more sober side of 007.
"If a psychiatrist and a thoroughly efficient copywriter got together to produce a fictional character who would be the mid-Twentieth century subconscious male ambition, the result would inevitably be James Bond."
Containing over 4000 general quotations about Bond, his books, his films, his creators, etc, etc., this book looks at the more sober side of 007.
"If a psychiatrist and a thoroughly efficient copywriter got together to produce a fictional character who would be the mid-Twentieth century subconscious male ambition, the result would inevitably be James Bond."
'Sir Ronald Howes' in The Sunday Times (1957)
"With Bond we are back in barbarism. If one met him, he would be a sinister bore. The Bond cult suggests our age may not be as modern as we like to think."
William Rees-Mogg
"Bond is a quite unashamed cad when it comes to love and women. This may not be admirable, but his accomplishments are."
O.F. Snelling, James Bond: A Report (1964)
"Bond could be seen as a modern embodiment of the agonistic spirit, of Nietzsche's assertion that the cruelty of victory is the pinnacle of life's jubilation."
Thomas Vinciguerra in The N.Y. Times (2003)
"007 - who is sufficiently complicated to compel our interest over a whole series of adventures. A patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish Puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind, he is pitted against impossible villains, enemies of democracy, megalomaniacs."
Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984)
"Mr. Fleming equipped his hero with an impeccable social background, good looks, bravery, toughness and a disillusioned sort of patriotism."
The New York Times (1954)
"Neither Mr. Fleming nor his hero shares the twentieth-century characteristic vice of cant. They are both carnivorous to the back-teeth and like their meat well hung. This, coming in the age of the murderous vegetarian, is rather pleasant than otherwise. For myself I am inclined to wish Bond many years and quick promotion in the order of St. Michael and St. George. I feel quite sure Mr. Fleming is too."
Anthony Hartley in The Spectator (1957)
"Bond is perhaps the last world policeman the English will ever know. He hunts the enemy in New York, Haiti, Turkey, South Africa, France, Belgrade. Wherever peace and the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon people is threatened, the arm of British justice reaches out and Bond is its fist ... Bond is Sir Francis Drake, Cecil Rhodes, and the Duke of Wellington, combined in a twentieth-century, post-concentration camp type of vigilante and hes a powerful chimera."
Robert Hatch in The Nation (1958)
"Even by British standards, hard-boiled, hard-drinking Bond is a pukka cad who divides his time between bedding beautiful women, downing four-star meals and killing counter-bounders, all with the same cool, clinical skill."
Time magazine (1962)
"In crime or spy fantasies the interest is partly a fairy-tale one, good versus bad in a rather basic way. James Bond would not mean so much to us if we were unable to feel that he was on the right side and that his cause was just. The roughies have no decent cause. Self-interest is all."
Kingsley Amis, 'My Favourite Sleuths' in Playboy (Dec 1966)
"Whatever Brand X critics may have written, Bond isn't just an Organization Man, but a rigid jingoist, almost loveably archaic. "
Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England (1970)
"Bond is as authentic an article of the sixties as Fred Astaire was of the thirties, and the issue of quality hardly seems germane."
Peter Schjeldahl in The New York Times (1971)
"Like Ulysses, he travels far ... He makes the obligatory trip to the underworld when he skin-dives in the Bahamas, travels through the sewers of Istanbul, visits the domain of Mr. Big in Harlem, negotiates Dr. No's cruel tunnel of terror ... He lives the dreams of countless drab people, his gun ready, his honour intact, his morals loose: the hero of our anxiety-ridden, mythless age."
George Grella, The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books (1972)
"At a time when everything is being either inflated or devalued it's comforting to know that at least one commodity maintains its hard currency. That's James Bond, who, by all rights, should be an antique, as emblematic of the sixties as the Beatles and flower power, but who goes blithely on as if time has had a stop."
Vincent Canby in The New York Times (1979)
"Some critics might say that Bond is nothing more than an actor in the movies. But then, we've all got to start somewhere ... As I see it, 007 is really a 10 - our modern day version of the great heroes who appeared from time to time throughout history ... put their lives on the line for the cause of good."
Ronald Reagan on 21 Years of James Bond (1983)
"In its Connery years, Bond comprised equal parts of Jack Kennedy's playboy glamour and Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy."
Richard Corliss in Time magazine (1987)
"The huge popularity of the novels defined the character of Bond as the quintessential spy. His enigmatic side, his physical endurance, and his abilities as a lover became standards by which to judge all superspies. To today's reader, or rereader, he seems almost a cliché."
Karen E. Walsh in Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers (1994)
"On the home front, Bond was a nasty clubland version of the angry young men, an amoral nihilist who found solace in snobbery and violence. In some respects, the critics were right; one of Ian's enduring strengths was his ability, almost in spite of himself, to reflect what was really going on."
Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (1995)
"Bond was the he-man idol for the anti-nostalgic 60s: he had no hypocrisy or piety in his patriotism. He touched on the youth audiences' secret fears that their dream world of peace and love ignored such atavistic and eternal drives as sexual and political conquest. By the 70s, Bond either worried or amused the most rabid kids, and either turned on or comforted their parents."
Michael Sragow in The New York Times (1999)
"James Bond is a literary brand name par excellence, a guarantee of a distinctive and reliable kind of armchair experience. An important part of Fleming's grip, of course, depends on 007, the suave and cruelly handsome Englishman (named after a distinguished ornithologist), a knife-thrower whose vices included drink ... and women, but that's not the whole story ... Bond is a snobbish, shallow-minded chauvinist with sado-masochistic inclinations."
Robert McCrum in The Observer (2002)
"Bond's very indestructibility becomes annoying - what is the point of all this violence if you know that the hero is always going to be saved by a well-placed cigarette case or the sudden arrival of Felix Leiter? Bond comes back from the grave with wearying predictability."
Richard Vinen in The Times Literary Supplement (2006)
"Fleming's literary Bond was even more out of kilter with the spirit of the age. He was a square, a man out of time. He hated the modern world of pop music and long-haired youths; he was fighting for a lost England."
Charlie Higson in The Spectator (2006)
To receive advanced notification of Quotino Royale's publication - scheduled for the second half of 2011 - please register your interest via Blue Eyed Books Email
Check out our first 007 Quotes Book - James Bond: Licence To Quote at Blue Eyed Books
.
