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.

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

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

It is a luxury to be understood.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

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

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

Language is the archives of history.

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

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?

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Words pay no debts.