Language is the archives of history.

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.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

It is a luxury to be understood.

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.

Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

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.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

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

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?