David Lynch Quotes

When you're an artist, you pick up on certain things that are in the air. You just feel it. It's not like you're sitting down, thinking, "What can I do to really mess things up?" You're getting ideas, and then the ideas feed into a story, and the story takes shape. And if you're honest about it and you're thinking about characters and what they do, you now see that your ideas are about trouble. You're feeling more depth, and you're describing something that is going on in some way.

Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.

All the movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.

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

Ideas are like fish. You don't make the fish, you catch the fish.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

David is always dealing with some sort of mystery in his work,” said Isabella Rossellini, who plays Dorothy Vallens. “He once said something that really helped me understand his work. He said, ‘In life you don’t know everything. You enter a room and people are sitting there and there’s an atmosphere, and you immediately know if you have to be careful about what you say, or if you have to be loud, or silent, or subdued — you immediately know it. The thing you don’t know is what’s next. In life we don’t know where the story is going or even where a conversation is going to go in the next minute.’ David’s awareness of this is central to his films. He’s very sensitive to the mystery that surrounds everything.”2

The sick reality about our over dependance on language is that trying to live without it is like a blind and deaf man with no arms or legs trying to navigate a dark narrow cave, and the cave is full of tarantulas.

Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.

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

My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree, there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow – and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you.

Don’t fight the darkness. Don’t even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light and the darkness goes. Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.