No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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

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

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?

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

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.

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

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.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.