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.

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

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

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

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.

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.

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?

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.