Quotes from Dennis Potter

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Everything we do has consequences.

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

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

Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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