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?

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.

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

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

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

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. 

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.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?