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.

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?

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.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

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 sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

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

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

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. 

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

Language is the archives of history.

Words pay no debts.

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