Daily Inspiration Quote by Dario Argento

There is a quiet act of violence in that "So": a shrug that doubles as a door slammed. Coming from Dario Argento, a director whose films practically dare you to disapprove, the line reads less like zen detachment than a survival tactic sharpened into an aesthetic. Critics are the designated auditors of taste, and Argento is famously uninterested in balancing the books. His cinema runs on sensation, on color and sound pushed past realism into delirium; the usual critical toolkit (coherence, plausibility, good judgment) can feel beside the point. Saying he has not thought about critics is a way of refusing the premise that his work should be adjudicated by their terms.

The subtext is both defensive and liberated. Argento has spent decades being praised as a visionary and dismissed as a stylist with thin scripts, with particular heat around later films that didn't land with the same cultural force as Suspiria or Deep Red. "A long time" suggests experience: the exhausted recognition that chasing approval is a losing genre, and that every new provocation will be met with the same moralizing about excess. So he opts out.

There's also a sly confidence embedded in the understatement. Not thinking about critics doesn't mean he doesn't know they're there; it means he doesn't grant them narrative control. For a director associated with giallo and horror - modes often patronized as "low" until they're suddenly canonized - the line is a reminder that legitimacy is usually retroactive. Argento is betting on the image, not the review.