Dennis Potter Quotes
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Philip Marlow: Minute by minute we make the world. We make our own world.
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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.
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The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself.
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As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
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The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.
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Religion, you can't a handle on it, you just have to know or not know-people either believe or they don't believe.
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You cannot make a pair of croak-voiced Daleks appear benevolent, even if you dress one of them in an Armani suit and call the other Marmaduke.
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Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word.
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Therapy, as opposed to analysis, is a whole construct of myth, beautiful and creative.
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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.
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Nigel: Why the cheap jokes? Jack: Cheap? When I was a kid, we were made to stay away from school on Empire Days so we wouldn't have to wave one of those little Union Jacks. We were the richest country in the world then, or so I'm told, and my old man bow-legged from malnutrition. Us kids nearly died laughing.
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I think childhood is to everyone a lost land.
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That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.
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Jack: I once had a candidate who was deeply concerned about the moral issues raised by myxomatosis. 'Look mate,' I said, 'Rabbits, as far as I'm aware, haven't yet had the vote.' Mind you, I'm an animal lover, too, you know. I've always advocated that the party that introduced family allowances for dogs would sweep the country. And it'll come, it'll come.
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The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?
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I have been aware, from the age of 6, that I had talent.
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The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.
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Georgie Pringle: The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, Son of man, there were two women, the daughters of one mother: And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity.
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Everything we do has consequences.
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Metaphor is embodied in language.
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My only regret is to die four pages too soon.
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To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there.
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Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.
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People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.