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

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

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.

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

It is a luxury to be understood.

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?

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 more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

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

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

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.

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

Words pay no debts.