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

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?

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.

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.

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?

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

Words pay no debts.

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.

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.

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

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