The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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.