Dennis Potter Quotes

Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

We should always look back on our own past with a sort of contempt, as long as the tenderness is there - but please let some of the contempt be there.

Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them and not just say, 'Oh they're all the same.' They are all the same in certain ways, alas - a political animal is such an animal.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

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

A bad act done will fester and create in its own way. It's not only goodness that creates. Bad things create. They have their own yeast.

There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work.

Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.

Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.

The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.

As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.

The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pains and terrors of childhood.

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.

I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

I haven't had a single moment of terror since they told me [I was dying]. My only regret is to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I'm quite happy to go.

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

A writer helps to show you things you knew but didn't know you knew.

Everything we do has consequences.

The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.

Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.

The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises

God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.

The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.

I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.