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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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

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

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

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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

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

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

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

Everything we do has consequences.

We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense.