"The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?"
About this Quote
Metaphor, for Dennis Potter, is the mind’s most suspicious magic trick: language pointing away from itself and still landing closer to the truth. Calling it “the strangest thing” isn’t wide-eyed wonder so much as a dramatist’s diagnosis. Theatre lives on that leap. A character can’t hand you their bloodstream, their dread, their desire. They hand you an image - weather, animals, machinery, a song on the radio - and suddenly the audience feels something more precise than literal description could deliver.
Potter’s phrasing does double work. “Human speech and human writing” names the ordinary tools, the everyday clutter of talk and text, then isolates the moment they mutate into art. “Create a metaphor” frames it as construction, not decoration: an act of making, almost engineering, where two unlike things are bolted together and a third meaning sparks in the gap. The second sentence (“That is an amazing leap, is it not?”) is a sly invitation to complicity. He’s not lecturing; he’s nudging you to notice your own participation in the trick. Metaphor only “works” if the listener completes the circuit.
In Potter’s world - and in the late-20th-century British tradition of sharp, socially alert drama - metaphor is also a survival strategy. It lets writers smuggle forbidden feelings past censorship, politeness, even self-deception. The subtext is that literal language is often insufficient or dishonest; metaphor is where human consciousness admits what it can’t say straight. Potter marvels because he’s describing the engine of empathy itself: the strange permission to become someone else, by way of an image.
Potter’s phrasing does double work. “Human speech and human writing” names the ordinary tools, the everyday clutter of talk and text, then isolates the moment they mutate into art. “Create a metaphor” frames it as construction, not decoration: an act of making, almost engineering, where two unlike things are bolted together and a third meaning sparks in the gap. The second sentence (“That is an amazing leap, is it not?”) is a sly invitation to complicity. He’s not lecturing; he’s nudging you to notice your own participation in the trick. Metaphor only “works” if the listener completes the circuit.
In Potter’s world - and in the late-20th-century British tradition of sharp, socially alert drama - metaphor is also a survival strategy. It lets writers smuggle forbidden feelings past censorship, politeness, even self-deception. The subtext is that literal language is often insufficient or dishonest; metaphor is where human consciousness admits what it can’t say straight. Potter marvels because he’s describing the engine of empathy itself: the strange permission to become someone else, by way of an image.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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