The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Words pay no debts.

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

Language is the archives of history.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.