David Lynch Quotes

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.

There's this beautiful ocean of bliss and consciousness that is able to be reached by any human being by diving within, which is really peaceful and harmonious and can be enlivened by the group process. This group is a peace-creating group. It saturates the atmosphere. This is all about establishing peace. Right now, we gotta get peace back in the world. Peace is a real thing.

Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.

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

I'm not a political person. ... I don't understand politics, I don't understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground and it's very frustrating watching it and seemingly we're not moving forward. Some change, simple, simple really, relatively speaking, and we're going forwards somewhere, you know? It could be a beautiful place. There's many little obstacles and there's many, many people that are just opposed and we're not going forward.

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.

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.

Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It's like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time.

When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home ... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.

The beginning dictates the direction and you never know where you're going to go ... the mood is what you're looking for, and somehow we always find it.

In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point.

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.

I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.

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.

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.