David Cronenberg > Quotes

“Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
― David Cronenberg

“Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.”
― David Cronenberg

“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.”
― David Cronenberg

“Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality.”
― David Cronenberg

“See, you can't rewrite, 'cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of the words, is a betrayal, and it's a sin, Martin, it's a sin."
--Hank (Kerouac)to Martin (Ginsberg) in the film Naked Lunch”
― David Cronenberg

“When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.”
― David Cronenberg

“Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to. (William Lee-Naked Lunch)”
― David Cronenberg

“But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”
― David Cronenberg

“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Long live the New Flesh!”
― David Cronenberg

“As a citizen, of course. As a parent, of course. But as an artist, that's where the paradox is - your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about political or social responsibility, you've amputated the best limbs you've got as an artist.”
― David Cronenberg

“As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real - a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can't allow yourself to say, 'I'm a different species from those people.' Because you aren't.

The criminal as monster is kind of common. That's very convenient because you can then say, 'Of course I'm not a monster, therefore I'm not a criminal therefore I have no potential in tern of criminality.' And that lets you off the hook. That gives you a nice wall between yourself and them.”
― David Cronenberg

“The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.”
― David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg

“We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Well, yes,when you no longer have any desire, you are dead. Even desire for a product, a consumer item, is better than no desire at all. Desire for a camera, for instance, even a cheap one, a tawdry one, is enough to keep death at bay." a wicked smile, an inhale of the cigarette with those lips. "If the desire is real, of course.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Mischievous smile. “I remember reading about Calvin Klein’s daughter. Every time she pulled down a lover’s pants, she was confronted by her father’s name on the band of his underwear. A total sex killer.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Listen to the crickets,” she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“My dentist said to me the other day: I've enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?”
― David Cronenberg

“...like being swept into the reality of a brilliantly written novel or charismatic movie: it's not that you believe in its literalness, but that there is a compelling truth in its organic life that envelops you and is absorbed by you almost on a physiological level. I remember experiencing a small earthquake in Los Angeles - only a four-point-six, I think - when I was there as a guest of the Academy the year they decided to develop a special Oscar for Philosophy in Cinema. A small earthquake, and yet the forced awareness that the earth beneath your feet was volatile, not stable, was terrifying, and for days afterward I was sure I could feel the earth trembling and threatening. I live with it still; it is ready to strike me at any moment, a special vertigo which is now part of my very physiology.

Celestine was like that earthquake. Celestine was also like that first LSD trip, the one you perhaps took in a deli in Brooklyn, where suddenly the colors all shifted toward the green end of the spectrum and your eyes became fish-eye lenses, distorting your total visual field, and the sounds became plastic, and time became infinitely variable, and you realized that reality is neurology, and is not absolute.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.”
― David Cronenberg

“Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.”
― David Cronenberg

“That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed