Top 35 Dennis Potter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything we do has consequences.”

— Dennis Potter

2. “Religion has always been the wound, not the bandage.”

— Dennis Potter

3. “Words themselves – the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises.”

— Dennis Potter

4. “I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.”

— Dennis Potter

5. “The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they’ve been in.”

— Dennis Potter

6. “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.”

— Dennis Potter

7. “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

8. “I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.”

— Dennis Potter

9. “God, I’m such a lazy writer – I can’t even think up new names.”

— Dennis Potter

10. “Television’s Mr. Filth: that’s me.”

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

12. “Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.”

— Dennis Potter

13. “You just don’t know writers. They’ll use anything, anybody. They’ll eat their young.”

— Dennis Potter

14. “I did not fully understand the dread term ‘terminal illness’ until I saw Heathrow for myself.”

— Dennis Potter

15. “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

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

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

18. “Metaphor is embodied in language.”

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

24. “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

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

— Dennis Potter

26. “A writer helps to show you things you knew but didn’t know you knew.”

— Dennis Potter

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

— Dennis Potter

28. “Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.”

— Dennis Potter

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Dennis Potter

34. “As adults, we do know more, but we don’t know enough. People can be very unthinkingly callous.”

— Dennis Potter

35. “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

36. “You have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself.”

— Dennis Potter