It is a luxury to be understood.

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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.

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

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. 

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

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.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

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

God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.