Dennis Potter quotes:

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

Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.

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.

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.

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

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

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.

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

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

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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

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

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

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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.

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

Everything we do has consequences.

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

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

The nowness of everything is absolutely wonderful.... If you see the present tense, boy do you see it, and boy can you celebrate it.