Best 34 quotes of Dennis Potter on MyQuotes

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.

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

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.

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.

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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 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.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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.

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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 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 nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. [...] If you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

. . . 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.

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