Daily Inspiration Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg draws a hard line between invention and revision, and he does it with the blunt pragmatism of someone who’s spent decades turning unruly ideas into shootable scenes. In his world, writing isn’t a romantic lightning strike; it’s a production problem. Re-writing is labor, yes, but it’s a familiar kind of labor: you already have matter to shape, a corpse on the table, something you can cut, stitch, and reanimate. Original writing is harder because it asks for genesis. You’re not improving a thing; you’re summoning it.

The subtext is a quiet demystification of authorship. Cronenberg isn’t flattering the writer-as-genius. He’s validating the director’s daily reality: constraints, budgets, actors, locations, and the slow discovery that “the movie” is rarely identical to “the script.” Rewriting becomes the ethical craft of adaptation - not just to notes, but to reality. It’s also a defense against a certain fetish for first drafts, the kind of cultural posture that treats revision as compromise rather than method.

Context matters: Cronenberg’s films are famous for body horror and conceptual risk, but they’re also meticulously engineered. That sensibility shows here. The line implies that the real courage is not polishing what exists, but committing to a first form that can be judged, misunderstood, or simply fail. Rewriting is surgery; original writing is evolution. One corrects the organism. The other invents it.