Toronto-born writer-director David Cronenberg
(Scanners, The Fly, Crash) is an odd duck.
“We’ve all got the disease—the disease of being finite. Death is the basis of all horror.”
“I identify with parasites.”
“Art is somewhat subversive of civilization. And yet at the same time it seems necessary for civilization. You don’t get civilization without art.”
“A superhero movie, by definition, is a comic book. I think people who are saying The Dark Knight Rises is ‘supreme cinema art,’ I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. It’s still Batman running around in a stupid cape.”
“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
“I don’t think there’s anything man wasn’t meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn’t do.”
“My dentist said to me the other day, ‘I’ve enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?’”
“Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: They confuse reality with illusion.”
“We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don’t need sex to re-create the race. You can have babies without sex.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I think I do my best subversiveness by not worrying about whether I’m subversive or not.”
“I don’t have a moral plan, I’m a Canadian.”
The Tanwars from Richmond, B.C., found a 20-inch wide maple leaf in 2011—the biggest in history.