Language is the archives of history.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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?

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

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

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.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.