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

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

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

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

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

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

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.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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.

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.