In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

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.

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.

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

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.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

Words pay no debts.

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

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?

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

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