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.

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

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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.

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.

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. 

It is a luxury to be understood.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

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.