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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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

Words pay no debts.

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.

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

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

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

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?

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.

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.