ARTS / Overheard

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.

Dennis Potter, Guardian

A movie's not only dead, it's not even very fresh. It comes in a can. That movie opening next week is last year's movie.

Orson Welles, in This is Orson Welles (HarperCollins, 1 March)

The true movie actor can never be too strong. What he must not be is too broad . . . You can tell an actor from a whore only if he's totally in the service

of his material.

Welles again

There is no rule which says that the best pop records are best sung by their writers.

Charlie Gillett, DJ, author and talent scout, Music Week

For several decades now, world literature, music, painting and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn tendency to grow not higher, but to the side; not towards the highest achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit, but towards their disintegration.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, New York Times Book Review

The music business needs a very thorough reappraisal. We've got to get the fire back in our bellies pretty damn quick.

Elliot Rashman, manager of Simply Red, Guardian

Everybody was universally screwed rigid.

Ed Bicknell, manager of Dire Straits, on the introduction of the Compact Disc,