No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Language is the archives of history.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

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.

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

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

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

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?

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.