Dennis Potter Quotes

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.

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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

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

Everything we do has consequences.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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.

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.

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

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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.