Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

Language is the archives of history.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

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

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

Words pay no debts.

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.

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 sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

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