Dennis Potter Quotes

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

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.

You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.

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

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

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.

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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

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.

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

Everything we do has consequences.

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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

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

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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