Quotes by Dennis Potter

• Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.
• Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.
• Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.
• That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.
• The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose.
• 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.
• 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 thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.
• Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.
• The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have 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.
• You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.
• 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.
• Metaphor is embodied in language.
• To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.
• As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.
• 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.
• Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.
• Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
• God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.
• As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
• 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.
• I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.
• 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.
• It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.
• Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.
• Everything we do has consequences.