When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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