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

Words pay no debts.

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.

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

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

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

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

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?