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.

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

It is a luxury to be understood.

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

Words pay no debts.

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