Literary Birthday – 15 March – David Cronenberg

Seven Quotes

1. Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; they confuse fantasy with reality.
2. 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.
3. Rewriting is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult
4. 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.
5. I see technology as being an extension of the human body.
6. 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.
7. 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 is a Canadian author, filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor. He is one of the originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre.

Source for photograph: Alan Langford, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Cronenberg_2012-03-08.jpg

 by Amanda Patterson

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