Top 80 David Cronenberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.”

— David Cronenberg

52. “The artist’s duty to himself is a combination of immense responsibility and immense irresponsibility. I think those two interlock.”

— David Cronenberg

53. “Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother?”

— David Cronenberg

54. “For example I don’t work with William Hurt the same way that I will work with Viggo. They’re different guys and they work in different ways. So a good sensitive director has his general style and technique and personality that he uses but you don’t impose that on the actors.”

— David Cronenberg

55. “The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog.”

— David Cronenberg

56. “Your’e seeing me develop, not only as a filmmaker if you’ve seen my earlier films, but you’re seeing me kind of learn how to be a human, how my philosophy has evolved.”

— David Cronenberg

57. “At a certain point the audience shouldn’t worry about catching every word and understanding every twist and turn, because at a certain point that’s pretty much impossible.”

— David Cronenberg

58. “For one shining moment, you were the king of fear,” she said.”

— David Cronenberg

59. “The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That’s why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.”

— David Cronenberg

60. “The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.”

— David Cronenberg

61. “The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.”

— David Cronenberg

62. “I have a real aversion to ghosts because I don’t believe in them. I think ghosts are actually a religious concept, because it means you believe in an afterlife. And I don’t.”

— David Cronenberg

63. “To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence.”

— David Cronenberg

64. “The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio film is that it wouldn’t actually be fun for me. It wouldn’t be exciting.”

— David Cronenberg

65. “But when you’re writing a script – for me anyway – you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be.”

— David Cronenberg

66. “Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon.”

— David Cronenberg

67. “Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.”

— David Cronenberg

68. “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

69. “Let’s put it this way, when I was casting, I cast Viggo first and then found someone who could play his wife, rather than the other way around. So for me he’s still the lead character.”

— David Cronenberg

70. “Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.”

— David Cronenberg

71. “It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s ‘saturation reporting’ was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.”

— David Cronenberg

72. “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

73. “You start selling the movie before you make it.”

— David Cronenberg

74. “She thought so hard all the time. Always writing, writing. I think it was a mercy killing. She asked him to kill her and he did. And then, of course, yes, he ate her.”

— David Cronenberg

75. “Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.”

— David Cronenberg

76. “It’s interesting about diseases, how they peak and tank.”

— David Cronenberg

77. “If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it’s obviously going to be a disaster.”

— David Cronenberg

78. “The warrior priests worship insects as sacred beings, and believe that the ingestion of insects ennobles man and keeps him from descending into bestiality.”

— David Cronenberg

79. “To me it’s very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American.”

— David Cronenberg

80. “I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be – although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.”

— David Cronenberg

81. “Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism.”

— David Cronenberg

82. “I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were destined to cause unrelenting pain and distress; yet the pleasure was real, and I took it greedily.”

— David Cronenberg

83. “For her, the message from Romme, the love letter’s message, was: Cut off your left breast, that rustling bag of insects, because if you don’t, those insects will spread their insect religion to your entire body.”

— David Cronenberg

84. “Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I’ve done that since the beginning. So that’s not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet.”

— David Cronenberg

85. “Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic.”

— David Cronenberg

86. “She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.”

— David Cronenberg

87. “We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write.”

— David Cronenberg

88. “Each kid has a different level of expertise and some of them are very raw and inexperienced and some are incredibly mature and experienced. So you just have to go with what they are rather than have some abstract technique that you’re going to try to apply to them.”

— David Cronenberg