Top 43 Dennis Potter Quotes
#1. That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.
Dennis Potter
#3. 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
#4. To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.
Dennis Potter
#5. I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.
Dennis Potter
#6. Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.
Dennis Potter
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names.
Dennis Potter
#11. It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions.
Dennis Potter
#12. Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
Dennis Potter
#13. I was given talent, and if you are given it, it is your obligation to use it.
Dennis Potter
#14. Children are very cruel, yes. Of course. Children are extraordinarily cruel little creatures.
Dennis Potter
#15. 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
#16. We tend to forget that life can only be defined in the present tense.
Dennis Potter
#17. I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.
Dennis Potter
#18. I'll have to lift your penis now to grease around it.
Dennis Potter
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they've been in.
Dennis Potter
#22. You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.
Dennis Potter
#23. 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
#24. You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.
Dennis Potter
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. That parish which allows the living to grasp the no longer cold hand of the beloved dead
Dennis Potter
#29. A writer helps to show you things you knew but didn't know you knew.
Dennis Potter
#30. Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.
Dennis Potter
#31. As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Dennis Potter
#32. As adults, we do know more, but we don't know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.
Dennis Potter
#33. You know a lot of what worked on this was taken from Harry Potter 2, the little Doby character, we had a lot of our skin stuff worked out and that helped a lot. We have a lot of exchange happening.
Dennis Muren
#34. Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises
Dennis Potter
#36. Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.
Dennis Potter
#37. I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.
Dennis Potter
#38. 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
#39. The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.
Dennis Potter
#41. Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality.
Dennis Potter
#42. Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.
Dennis Potter
#43. 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
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