David Lynch Quotes

I guess I got whacked hard in the mystery department when I was little. I found the world completely and totally fascinating then — it was like a dream. They say that people who think they had a happy childhood are blocking something out, but I think I really had one. Of course I had the usual fears, like going to school — I knew there was some sort of problem there. But every other person sensed that problem too, so my fears were pretty normal.

I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think.
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.

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd!

My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.

I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. Of course, I had the usual fears, like going to school ... For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty. The teachers didn't encourage knowledge or a positive attitude.

Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!

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.

A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it.

New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts.

Madison is a very enlightened, idealized Midwestern place, and the people there are friendly.

Float with me in the world of ether.

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 so you can express a feeling and a thought that can't be conveyed any other way. It's 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. It's 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.

Human consciousness is too vast to fit between the covers of a book, and every experience has too many facets to count.