Dennis Potter Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.

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

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

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

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

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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

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.

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

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

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

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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

The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderful.... If you see the present tense, boy do you see it, and boy can you celebrate it.

Everything we do has consequences.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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

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

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. But lurking somewhere behind their rhetoric and their spittle are important choices that we should make.

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.

There is a culture of anti-Mormonism on this campus.

You cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke

Blake wasn't really merely my student. He was a comrade and friend.

Blake was an activist and artist whose lifestyle truly reflected his values. He was the lead singer of Parallax, whose (song) lyrics involve a deep reflection on the alienation produced by our consumerist society. Of all the students I have had over my six years at UVSC, Blake was the most authentic.

Blake was an activist and artist whose lifestyle truly reflected his values, ... He was the lead singer of Parallax, whose (song) lyrics involve a deep reflection on the alienation produced by our consumerist society. Of all the students I have had over my six years at UVSC, Blake was the most authentic.