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.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

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

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

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

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

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

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?

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.