Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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.

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.

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?

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

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.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

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

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

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.