David Cronenberg Quotes

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

If you are delusional, sometimes the reality catches up with your delusion, and then all of a sudden you are a genius.

A mad person isn't someone who sees what isn't there; he's someone who sees what is there but that others can't see. I really believe that.

What we want is not freedom but its appearances.

I've always been a big fan of Philip K. Dick; I love his work. There's a returning theme of identity and the fragility of our identity. Even when we are looking at what we think is a stark reality, it might actually be something completely different.

What one reads in the newspaper and what one sees on the street are absolutely not the same.

Reason is the illusion of reality

The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world as we all know it, is only a description.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.

Oh yes! The one man in the world who never believes he's mad is the madman.

As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

Reality can easily become the current fantasy.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.