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

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.

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

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.

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

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?

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

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

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.

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.

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

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