Dennis Potter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Television's Mr. Filth: that's me.”

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

“Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Everything we do has consequences.”