Dennis Potter

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

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.

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.

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

Everything we do has consequences.

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

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

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

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

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

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

Metaphor is embodied in language.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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