Top 100 Cronenberg's Quotes
#1. You have to nail the right tone because sometimes when you just see his films cold, you're not quite sure. It's the same in - I'm trying to think of other directors with a similar sense - David Lynch's films, Tim's films, some of Cronenberg's stuff.
Danny Elfman
#2. Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself.
Vincent Cassel
#3. I like Cronenberg's early work; his '80s films had all these weird, amorphous flesh objects in them.
Autre Ne Veut
#4. David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster.
Steve Erickson
#5. David Cronenberg's mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film.
David Foster Wallace
#6. I like being a part of David Cronenberg's world, I feel very at home there
Robert Pattinson
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality.
David Cronenberg
#12. Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It's a good tone for an operating theatre. It is a theatre, after all.
David Cronenberg
#13. 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
#14. All romances end in tragedy. One of the key people in a romance becomes a monster sooner or later.
David Cronenberg
#15. David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation.
J. Hoberman
#17. I think film is a director's medium and the good filmmakers that I like tell the darker stories. Therefore, I'm always inclined to follow people like David Cronenberg.
Naomi Watts
#18. I'm very anti-religious because religion tends to disembody you.
David Cronenberg
#19. Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.
David Cronenberg
#20. 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
#21. So pathetic," he said, with a grunt. "So sad. Such a cliche. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don't feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel...pathetic.
David Cronenberg
#22. But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.
David Cronenberg
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.
David Cronenberg
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. If the audience lets that stuff wash over them, you know - almost like music, rather than dialogue - and doesn't fight it, then they'll have a much easier time rather than being sort of frustrated and confused otherwise. But if you get in the right state of mind it really does work quite well,
David Cronenberg
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art.
David Cronenberg
#33. 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
#34. You're 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
#35. 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
#36. That's rule number one for a photographer, isn't it? Fill your frame?
David Cronenberg
#38. The artist's duty to himself is a combination of immense responsibility and immense irresponsibility. I think those two interlock.
David Cronenberg
#39. 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
#40. Are we playing Faster Fingers or are we thinking?" Faster Fingers was their code for supplanting brain/memory with Google Search.
David Cronenberg
#41. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it's obviously going to be a disaster.
David Cronenberg
#50. 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
#51. Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it's inevitable that it should come home to roost.
David Cronenberg
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.
David Cronenberg
#55. If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!
Mark Kingwell
#56. Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios.
Vincent Cassel
#57. When I am creating art, I have absolutely no social responsibility. It's like dreaming.
David Cronenberg
#58. Many wonderful, creative people have won Oscars, so if you win one, you're in their company.
David Cronenberg
#59. We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things.
David Cronenberg
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.
David Cronenberg
#69. On to some juicy French philosophical sex-killing murder-suicide cannibal thing. You?"
"Still the controversial Hungarian breast-cancer radioactive seed implant treatment thing. I adore you."
"Je t'adore aussi. Call me. Bye."
"Bye.
David Cronenberg
#70. 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
#72. The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner's manual.
David Cronenberg
#73. David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.
William Hurt
#74. I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot.
Viggo Mortensen
#75. Cosmopolis is the movie of my life. I didn't consider myself an actor before, even if I had 10 years of acting behind me. I always felt like a fraud, and inappropriate. I doubt a lot. David Cronenberg gave me confidence in myself. He changed my way of acting and thinking in this industry.
Robert Pattinson
#76. I did the David Cronenberg film, A History of Violence, with Viggo Mortensen and I played a real sociopath. For the next seven years, I played the psycho-of-the-week.
Greg Bryk
#78. 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
#79. Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to. (William Lee-Naked Lunch)
David Cronenberg
#80. So not only can you not imagine dying, you can't really imagine existence before you were born.
David Cronenberg
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Since 'A Dangerous Method,' I've had meetings with everyone from J.J. Abrams to the producers of 'Drive.' And they all have the same thing in common; they say: 'Wow you worked with Cronenberg.' He gave me instant film cred.
Sarah Gadon
#84. I don't mind writing so I didn't find that difficult, it's just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it's pretty neat.
David Cronenberg
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. My dentist said to me the other day: I've enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?
David Cronenberg
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism.
David Cronenberg
#97. We're all photojournalists now. It's no longer enough just to write.
David Cronenberg
#98. Nah, I've done sex scenes before, you know, like in video.
David Cronenberg
#99. 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
#100. 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
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