Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

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. 

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

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