The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

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.

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. 

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

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

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

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

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?

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

Words pay no debts.