Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

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

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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.

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

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

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

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.

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

It is a luxury to be understood.

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.