The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

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.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.