ARTS / Overheard

Whatever one may think of ethnic music, the idea that it is any substitute for Beethoven or Mozart is quite wrong.

David Mellor, In Tune, Radio 3

One thing I will never do is use a body double. That's hypocritical. It's like saying, I'm too good to be naked in a movie, the bitch down the street can do it for me.

Rosie Perez, film actress, Vibe

So now you go and look at each scene and you say, 'That's a boom, that's not a boom, that's a boom, that's not a boom.' And if you get a whole long section with no booms, you say, 'Oh, shit. Something's wrong.'

Fred Schepisi, director, on the art of film-making, New Yorker

When I was at school there were two ways of learning about the facts of life: from one's boyfriend and from literature. What we knew about sex we gleaned from Penguin Modern Classics.

Linda Grant (author of Sexing the Millennium), Literary Review

In Nanjing dialect, the sounds 'i luv yoo' mean 'Would you care for some spiced oil?' 'What the West does, encountering our art,' the artist Ni Haifeng said, 'is to think we're saying we love you, when we're only having a private conversation about cooking.'

Report in the New York Times Magazine