"There are women who take it to the wire. That's what they are looking for, the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack."

“Sean Connery at the British Film Institute”

“My start, my childhood, was less than auspicious. But when I was young, we didn’t know we lacked anything, because we had nothing to compare it to — and there's a freedom in that. I had a very hard working mother and father, I think of them both a great deal. I got my break — big break — when I was five years old. And it's taken me more than seventy years to realize it. You see, at five, I learned to read. It's that simple, and it's that profound. I left school at thirteen, I didn’t have a formal education, and I believe I would not be standing here tonight, without the books, the plays — the scripts. It's been a long journey from Fountainbridge to this evening — with you all. Though my feet are tired, my heart is not.”

“When I spoke about Bond with 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 Warmth, wine, food or clothes — because the job, and he with it, may terminate at any minute. But the virtues that Amis mentions — loyalty, honesty — are there, too.”

“An open-handed slap is justified – if all other alternatives fail and there has been plenty of warning. If a woman is a bitch, or hysterical, or bloody-minded continually, then I'd do it.”

“I suppose more than anything else I'd like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso. They know that life is not just a popularity contest.”