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.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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.

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

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

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

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

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. 

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

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

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?