"The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination"
About this Quote
Potter is smuggling a provocation into what sounds like a modest craft note: imagination stops being weightless the moment it becomes a sentence. For a dramatist, that shift matters. Writing doesn’t just record ideas; it forces them to take on consequence. The minute you "put it down", you choose a shape, a rhythm, a point of view, a set of exclusions. That act of selection is a confession of sorts. It reveals what your mind keeps returning to, what it fears, what it wants to redeem. Even fantasy, in other words, carries fingerprints.
The line also pushes back against the polite fiction that art is escapism and therefore exempt from accountability. Potter’s work often lived in the friction between memory, desire, and damage, and he was fascinated by how stories can both protect and expose us. His claim isn’t that imagination is factual; it’s that it’s diagnostic. Once externalized, it becomes evidence - not of what happened, but of what feels real inside the person making it.
Subtextually, he’s arguing for artistic authority without pretending to innocence. If you authored the dream, you own the truth it’s orbiting. That’s why the phrasing "must be" lands with a hint of severity: writing turns private reverie into a public object, and public objects invite judgment. Potter is insisting that the imaginative act is never just play. It’s a declaration of inner reality, and the page is where self-deception becomes hardest to maintain.
The line also pushes back against the polite fiction that art is escapism and therefore exempt from accountability. Potter’s work often lived in the friction between memory, desire, and damage, and he was fascinated by how stories can both protect and expose us. His claim isn’t that imagination is factual; it’s that it’s diagnostic. Once externalized, it becomes evidence - not of what happened, but of what feels real inside the person making it.
Subtextually, he’s arguing for artistic authority without pretending to innocence. If you authored the dream, you own the truth it’s orbiting. That’s why the phrasing "must be" lands with a hint of severity: writing turns private reverie into a public object, and public objects invite judgment. Potter is insisting that the imaginative act is never just play. It’s a declaration of inner reality, and the page is where self-deception becomes hardest to maintain.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Dennis
Add to List
