"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."

“Sean Connery at the British Film Institute”

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

“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.”