Dennis Potter Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Dennis Potter
Even in a future land of Muzak, monosodium glutamate and melamined encounters, the old resilient dreams will insist on making metaphors and finding illumination in the midst of surrounding dross. There is, then, no place where 'God' cannot reach.

Dennis Potter
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.

Dennis Potter
Jack:
A potential Cabinet Minister if ever I saw one. Dishonest in a way which seems embarrassingly frank. Upright when creeping. And dignified when at his most stupid.

Dennis Potter
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.

Dennis Potter
As a writer you will know that one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is, a character's told 'you've got three months to live,' and who would you kill? I call my cancer Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because that man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time (I've got too much writing to do...) I would shoot the bugger if I could. There is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press. And the pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British political life, and it's an important part of the cynicism and misperception of our own realities that is destroying so much of our political discourse.

Dennis Potter
There's no way that you, nor any other man, could ever understand what it is that you men make us women think of our bodies.

Dennis Potter
I think we should always look back on our own past with a sort of tender contempt. As long as the tenderness is there but also please let some of the contempt be there, because we know what we're like, we know how we hustle and bustle and shove and push, and you sometimes use grand words to cloak it.

Dennis Potter
By the time I stood for Parliament I was already carrying a walking stick, and the combination of my illness and my sense of withdrawal from a belief in a kind of Britain I would have preferred to see meant that I was no longer satisfied with such a (political) role: it wasn't creative enough, it didn't satisfy me. I simply didn't fit the bill in the end. Although I was a Labour candidate I didn't even vote in that election. I was probably the only candidate who didn't vote for his party.

Dennis Potter
Jack:
You'll have to compromise, smile, concern yourself with your public image, measure your words as carefully as possible... and turn yourself into a dutiful party hack! [chuckles] Never mind, Nigel, never mind.

Dennis Potter
I find the word 'British' harder and harder to use as time passes.

Dennis Potter
The blossom is out in full now, it's plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white. It's the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous.

Dennis Potter
The closer writing approaches to therapy, the worse it becomes.

Dennis Potter
Religion to me has always been the wound, not the bandage.

Dennis Potter
To be a candidate is to submit to a personally humiliating experience, in which the set smile freezes on your face like a grin on a corpse. Dead ideas. Dead thoughts. Dead slogans. All of them sicked up on your doorstep. No wonder people are disgusted by this gruesome charade.

Dennis Potter
Biography is in some ways the most brutish of all the arts. It shifts about uncomfortably in the strangely uncertain middle ground between deliberate assassination and helpless boot-licking.

Dennis Potter