Top 80 David Cronenberg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Long live the new flesh.”

— David Cronenberg

2. “I’m very anti-religious because religion tends to disembody you.”

— David Cronenberg

3. “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

4. “Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab.”

— David Cronenberg

5. “When I am creating art, I have absolutely no social responsibility. It’s like dreaming.”

— David Cronenberg

6. “Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy.”

— David Cronenberg

7. “I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation.”

— David Cronenberg

8. “The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art.”

— David Cronenberg

9. “I like to laze around. I think that’s a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you’re trying to find.”

— David Cronenberg

10. “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

11. “You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.”

— David Cronenberg

12. “The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.”

— David Cronenberg

13. “All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they’re stereotypes because they’re true.”

— David Cronenberg

14. “I work with my dreams or nightmares.”

— David Cronenberg

15. “When we talk about violence, we’re talking about the destruction of the human body, and I don’t lose sight of that. In general, my filmmaking is fairly body-oriented, because what you’re photographing is people, bodies.”

— David Cronenberg

16. “I’m not very well organized unless I’m plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I’m doing that, I have to be organized.”

— David Cronenberg

17. “That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?”

— David Cronenberg

18. “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

19. “Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.”

— David Cronenberg

20. “More blood! More blood!”

— David Cronenberg

21. “As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don’t have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel.”

— David Cronenberg

22. “Many wonderful, creative people have won Oscars, so if you win one, you’re in their company.”

— David Cronenberg

23. “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

24. “Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.”

— David Cronenberg

25. “Technology is us. There is no separation. It’s a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the universe. I’m rather sure of that.”

— David Cronenberg

26. “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

27. “Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.”

— David Cronenberg

28. “I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I’ve been sometimes compared to those other guys. We’re after different game.”

— David Cronenberg

29. “I’m just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren’t going to be alive forever – that bothered me.”

— David Cronenberg

30. “You know, there’s a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.”

— David Cronenberg

31. “It’s impossible to make a movie out of ‘Naked Lunch.’ A literal translation just wouldn’t work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country of the world.”

— David Cronenberg

32. “But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult – and it’s very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder.”

— David Cronenberg

33. “You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. 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

34. “All romances end in tragedy. One of the key people in a romance becomes a monster sooner or later.”

— David Cronenberg

35. “I don’t have a moral plan, I’m a Canadian.”

— David Cronenberg

36. “My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There’s nothing else, and when we die, that’s it. No afterlife.”

— David Cronenberg

37. “My dentist said to me the other day: I’ve enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?”

— David Cronenberg

38. “The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase’s athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed;.”

— David Cronenberg

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

— David Cronenberg

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

— David Cronenberg

41. “Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.”

— David Cronenberg

42. “So not only can you not imagine dying, you can’t really imagine existence before you were born.”

— David Cronenberg

43. “The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It’s not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.”

— David Cronenberg

44. “For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It’s impossible to do.”

— David Cronenberg

45. “I can’t imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all.”

— David Cronenberg

46. “Listen to the crickets,” she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything.”

— David Cronenberg

47. “I have learned the password of two of my neighbors’ wireless home networks, so you can use theirs if you like. Be a parasite on their network. Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. Connect to anywhere in the world you like.”

— David Cronenberg

48. “She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. “They ache a bit, you know. After all, they’ve been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower.”

— David Cronenberg

49. “Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It’s a good tone for an operating theater. It is a theater, after all.”

— David Cronenberg

50. “Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn’t turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?”

— David Cronenberg