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

God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.

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.

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

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.