Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

Growth is supposed to make you freer. Dennis Potter twists the expectation: the better he gets, the more he has to control himself. Coming from a dramatist who made a career out of jagged formal invention and emotional exposure, "tame" lands like a provocation. It suggests that artistry is not a steady expansion of wildness, but an increasingly disciplined management of it.

The line is built on a clever rhythm of accumulation: "improves or broadens or widens" reads like a self-justifying mantra, the kind of thing you tell yourself when ambition starts to look like virtue. Then the sentence pivots, quietly punitive: "the more surely". Not "the more I choose", but the more inevitability tightens. Mastery becomes a leash.

Potter's subtext is about craft as self-surveillance. As technique grows, so does the ability to anticipate your own tricks, indulgences, and evasions. Early work can rely on raw intensity and the thrill of transgression; later work has to confront what that intensity is for. "Tame myself" implies editing, structure, patience, even moral responsibility - not in the preachy sense, but in the sense that your work stops being a private purge and becomes a public instrument.

In the context of late-20th-century British drama, where realism and polemic often competed with formal experiment, Potter is signaling that widening your range doesn't mean piling on spectacle. It means submitting your impulses to shape - and accepting that the sharpest edge of artistic freedom is restraint.