Dennis Potter Quotes
"Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Childhood, Personality, Will, Words)
"Television's Mr. Filth: that's me."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Television)
"That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Vision, Culture, Now)
"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
(Related: Knowledge)
"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
(Related: Childhood, Loss, Magic, Wonder)
"The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Work)
"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
(Related: People, May)
"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
(Related: Imagination, Truth, Act)
"Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Myth, Therapy)
"The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Trouble, Words)
"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
(Related: Work, End, Fiction)
"You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Order)
"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
(Related: Metaphor, Speech, Writing)
"I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves."
- Dennis Potter
"Metaphor is embodied in language."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Language, Metaphor)
"To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Love)
"As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: 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
(Related: Act, Goodness, Will)
"Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Children)
"Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Poetry, Children, Poets)
"God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: God, Names, Writer)
"As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Criticism, Writing)
"I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Illness)
"I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Age, Talent)
"I think childhood is to everyone a lost land."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Childhood, Land)
"I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Talent, Obligation)
"Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Ideals, Word)
"It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Emotions)
"Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Art)
"Everything we do has consequences."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: Consequences)