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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Language is the archives of history.