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

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 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.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

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.

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.

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

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

Language is the archives of history.

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.