We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

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

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

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.

Words pay no debts.

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

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

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. 

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.