David Lynch Quotes

you keep your eye on the donut not the hole.

Actors are so filled with wonder and imagination and they get it so quick, no matter how strange something is. They get it, and their talent is to make it real from a deep place. When that happens it's really, really beautiful.

It’s maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.

There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery

Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way they really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it ... I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there's suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it's people kind of going in circles. It's fantastic. It's like a strange carnival: it's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of pain.

(about cinema) It's like opening a door and go into a new world.

Cinema is a language. It can say things — big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.

You're right on the money with that. We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.

...it's a truth of life that some things are not built so well and they become complicated and they need to be figured out and they're hard to figure out.