#note to self: rewatch licence to kill

[arefriendsdetectives2]

He’s a man who wants human contact; the need for love seems to overflow from him. Yet he can’t afford emotional involvement, he can’t fall in love or marry or have children, because that would prevent him functioning in a world where the possibility of his death is ever-present... Above all, I realized that he hates to kill. He recalls that when he was young, he thought it was all in the cause of righteousness, but now he perceives his assassinations as dirty murders. He kills himself by killing someone who’s himself on the other side. Yet he carries on, always regretting it, always trying to shut it out of his mind. Altogether, it seemed to me that Bond was a complex man, with many more facets than I’d realized. Not a shining knight, but someone deeply unhappy with his job, suffering from confusion, ennui, moral revulsion and what Fleming calls accidie.

Timothy Dalton from The Many Lives of James Bond: How The Creators of 007 Have Decoded The Superspy by Mark Edlitz