Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

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

Words pay no debts.

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

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.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

It is a luxury to be understood.

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

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. 

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.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

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