David Cronenberg Quotes

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

An amateur may not be an artist, though an artist should be an amateur.

I never wanted to be a professional artist; I think that's limiting.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

If we agree that the world is not what it seems, then we have an important question: What shall we do about it?

One of my biggest heroes in music has been David Bowie. He's said, 'I'm going to be a painter now, or I'm going to do some films,' and his audience is very forgiving, because they understand him as an artist. Whether you agree or like the result, you respect that he's expressing his artistic feelings.

It is so much worse to be a mediocre artist than to be a mediocre post-office clerk.

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

I'm a guy who had to perform some way. I had to perform in some way. If not as an actor, I'd perform as an artist. It would have been something that would be outstanding in its own way.

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

There's so much going on today. I continually hear, sometimes from artists, that everything's done. It's been done. I fail to see that.

I try never to say no when it comes to creativity, but I do try and lead down an "appropriate road" - like not on furniture or the walls.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.

As artists, it’s our job to delve into the uncomfortable, the difficult and the challenging.

It would be a terrible world if everyone was an artist. Nothing would get done!

Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

what a writer does is to try to make sense of life. I think that's what writing is, I think that's what painting is. It's seeking that thread of order and logic in the disorder, and the incredible waste and marvelous profligate character of life. What all artists are trying to do is to make sense of life.

I have a firm faith in art, a firm confidence in its being a powerful stream which carries a man to a harbor, though he himself must do his bit too.

It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

I'm going to be a better actor, or I'm going to try to be a better actor. I'm going to try to be a better musician. I'm going to be an artist instead of just this one thing.