Daily Inspiration Quote by David Cronenberg

Censorship, in Cronenberg's framing, isn’t merely prudish or authoritarian; it’s a kind of pathological category error. His jab lands because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. Censors present themselves as guardians of “the real world,” protecting audiences from corrupting images. Cronenberg suggests the opposite: their panic reveals an inability to keep symbolic violence separate from actual violence, representation from endorsement, fantasy from instruction. That’s why the comparison to psychosis stings. It’s not a clinical diagnosis so much as an accusation of distorted perception dressed up as civic duty.

The line also doubles as a defense of art’s unsettling power. Cronenberg built a career on body horror and technological intimacy precisely to probe the unstable border between flesh and idea, desire and disgust, self and environment. When he says censors confuse reality with illusion, he’s defending the viewer’s capacity to metabolize images without collapsing into them - and calling out the recurring cultural impulse to blame art for what society can’t face in itself.

The subtext is political even when it sounds psychological: censorship often works by insisting that depiction equals contagion. If you show it, you spread it; if you name it, you legitimize it. Cronenberg rejects that superstition. He implies that the censor’s true fear isn’t that audiences will be harmed by images, but that images will reveal uncomfortable realities already there - about power, sex, violence, and the body.