Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

Words aren’t pristine tools in Dennis Potter’s hands; they’re secondhand goods, passed around, licked, and repackaged until you can’t tell whether you’re speaking or being spoken through. The line’s genius is its bodily disgust. It yanks language out of the library and drops it into the mouth - wet, intimate, compromised. “Whose mouths” isn’t just a joke about contamination; it’s a warning about ownership. Every phrase arrives with fingerprints: class codes, tabloid rhythms, political spin, romantic scripts, institutional euphemisms. You reach for what feels like your own sentence and discover it’s already been trained to perform.

That suspicion tracks perfectly with Potter’s work as a dramatist, where dialogue is never merely communication but choreography: characters borrow lines, parrot clichés, and hide inside stock expressions when the truth is too sharp. He wrote in a Britain thick with broadcast voices and public messaging, and his most famous plays (like The Singing Detective) obsess over how pop songs, slogans, and genre conventions colonize inner life. The mouth is where the personal meets the public; it’s also where performance happens. Potter’s twist is to suggest that language can’t avoid becoming a kind of ventriloquism.

The subtext is bleakly comic: even sincerity is suspect because it comes pre-owned. Yet there’s a bracing honesty in the cynicism. If words are always contaminated, the real artistry - and the moral work - lies in choosing them with open eyes, or bending them until they confess where they’ve been.