Dennis Potter famous quotes

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

#Airports #Saws #Illness

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Past #Long #Looks

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Animal #Choices #Political

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

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.
-- Dennis Potter

#Being Yourself #Order #About Yourself

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

#Writing #Speech #Metaphor

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Regret #Single Mom #Dying

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

#Imagination

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

#Personality #Childhood #Fatherhood

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

#Emotion #Dangerous #Instant

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

#Believe #People

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.
-- Dennis Potter

#Hierarchy #Printed

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

#Vision #Culture #Common

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

#People #Excess #May

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

#Children #Humans

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

#Art #Definitions

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.
-- Dennis Potter

#Religion #Wounds

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

#Too Much #Obscure

Metaphor is embodied in language.
-- Dennis Potter

#Language #Metaphor

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.
-- Dennis Potter

#Television #Filth

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Pain #Loss #Eden

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Art #Believe #People

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Done #Yeast #Way

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

#Mouths #Trouble

Everything we do has consequences.
-- Dennis Potter

#Consequence

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

#People #Adults #Enough

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

#Children #Littles #Creatures

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

#Children #Writing #Poet

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

#Thinking #Names #Lazy

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.
-- Dennis Potter

#Believe #I Believe #Responsible

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

#Age #Talent

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

#Use #Talent #Given

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.
-- Dennis Potter

#Thinking #Land #Childhood

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

#Mask #Disguise #Discourse

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.
-- Dennis Potter

#Writing #Analysis #Fiction

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

#Beautiful #Creative #Analysis

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

#Writing #Use #Young