History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

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.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Language is the archives of history.

In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.