David Lynch Quotes

The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing.

It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments... In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song — Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘Blue Velvet.’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.

I started out just as a regular person, growing up in the Northwest. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, studying trees. So I was in the woods a lot. And the woods for a child are magical. I lived in what people call small towns. My world was what would be considered about a city block, maybe two blocks. Everything occurred in that space. All the dreaming, all my friends existed in that small world. But to me it seemed so huge and magical. There was plenty of time available to dream and be with friends. I liked to paint and I liked to draw. And I often thought, wrongly, that when you got to be an adult, you stopped painting and drawing and did something more serious.

The house is a place where things can go wrong.

"Jennifer Lynch: "My father deeply loved both of his parents, but he also despised all that
goodness, the white picket fence and all that. He has a romantic idea of
that stuff, but he also hated it because he wanted to smoke cigarettes
and live the art life, and they went to church and everything was perfect
and quiet and good. It made him a little nutty.

Ultimately, each life is a mystery until we each solve the mystery, and that's where we are all headed whether we know it or not.

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.

The beautiful thing is that when you catch one fish that you love, even if it’s a little fish — a fragment of an idea — that fish will draw in other fish, and they’ll hook onto it. Then you’re on your way. Soon there are more and more and more fragments, and the whole thing emerges. But it starts with desire.

There is a plot. What would be the point of just a bunch of things? There's a story, but the story can hold abstractions. I believe in story. I believe in characters. But I believe in a story that holds abstractions, and a story that can be told based on ideas that come in an unconventional way."

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.

You can tell all the stories you want, but you still haven’t gotten across what the experience was like. It’s like telling somebody a dream. It doesn’t give them the dream.

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it.

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. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.