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

About Dennis Potter

Dennis Christopher George Potterwas an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials Pennies from Heavenand The Singing Detectiveas well as the BBC television plays Blue Remembered Hillsand Brimstone and Treacle (1976).

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More quotes from Dennis Potter

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves.

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

Everything we do has consequences.

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

Television’s Mr. Filth: that’s me.

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

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

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)

Metaphor is embodied in language.

Dennis Potter

British dramatist and screenwriter (1935-1994)