Dennis Potter Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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.

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.

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

Everything we do has consequences.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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

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

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

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

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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