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.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

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. 

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.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

Words pay no debts.

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

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.