Overheard

I don't sit there thinking: What can I do to make this scene outrageous? It's more a case of switching off the censor in your brain.

Mark Ravenhill, author of the play Shopping and Fucking and now responsible for writing the third series of This Life, Frank magazine

Every actor just plays himself. Acting's not an art, it's only a technique; it's the ability to say words from a script and make them seem natural.

Rupert Everett on the art of acting, Daily Telegraph

Big fat stuffy old pompous institution.

Damien Hirst on the Royal Academy, Evening Standard

The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction. And I don't really want to go beyond that.

Marcus Harvey, artist, on his controversial portrait of Myra Hindley, to be hung at the Royal Academy's show of young British artists, Guardian

You have to have a certain amount of know-how about how people behave and interact, and I don't think I've ever had very much of that.

Critic Frank Kermode on why he never became a novelist, Desert Island Discs