Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Dennis Potter Said



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

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

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

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

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

Everything we do has consequences.
Dennis Potter

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.
Dennis Potter

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

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

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.
Dennis Potter

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

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.
Dennis Potter

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

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.
Dennis Potter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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