1. “Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.”
2. “I shall curse you with book, bell, and candle.”
3. “Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”
4. “The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.”
5. “It is always difficult to think and reason in a new language.”
6. “No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.”
7. “Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.”
8. “Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.”
9. “Language is the armoury of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
10. “All true language / is incomprehensible, / like the chatter / of a beggar’s teeth.”
11. “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?”
12. “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.”
13. “Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”
14. “Speak and speed: the close mouth catches no flies.”
15. “Language! The blood of the soul, Sir! Into which our thoughts run and out of which they grow!”
16. “I live by good soup, and not on fine language.”
17. “The time will come when our successors will wonder how we could have been ignorant of things so obvious.”
18. “Nothing in human affairs is more unstable and precarious than power unsupported by its own strength.”
19. “It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?”
20. “A sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener with constant use.”
21. “We sense time, so we sense ourselves. Face to face with an image, we sense ourselves. We are always on the outside when it comes to the other.”
22. “The frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”