Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My only regret is to die four pages too soon.

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

Nigel Barton:Everyone says 'Up at Oxford'. You come 'down' when you've finished there. Harry Barton: Well, what's this then? Does bloody Oxford move up and down the bloody map then?

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

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