Dennis Potter Quotes & Sayings

We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense. — Dennis Potter

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

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

Everything we do has consequences. — 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. — Dennis Potter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nigel Barton:Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there.
Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then? — Dennis Potter

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

I'll have to lift your penis now to grease around it. — Dennis Potter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this season, the blossom is out in full now, there in the west early. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, but the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance ... not that I'm interested in reassuring people - bugger that. The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it. — Dennis Potter

Metaphor is embodied in language. — Dennis Potter

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

My only regret is to die four pages too soon. — Dennis Potter

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

That parish which allows the living to grasp the no longer cold hand of the beloved dead — Dennis Potter

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

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

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

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