Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by David Lynch. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for David Lynch
David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, painter, visual artist, musician, writer, and occasional actor. A recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, Lynch has received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director, and the César Award for Best Foreign Film twice, as well as the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. In 2007, a panel of critics convened by The Guardian announced that 'after all the discussion, no one could fault the conclusion that David Lynch is the most important film-maker of the current era', while AllMovie called him "the Renaissance man of modern American filmmaking". His work led to him being labeled "the first popular surrealist" by film critic Pauline Kael.
Lynch initially studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977), became a success on the midnight movie circuit, and he followed that by directing The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), and Blue Velvet (1986). Lynch next created his own television series with Mark Frost, the popular murder mystery Twin Peaks (1990–91), which ran for two seasons. He also created the film prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the road film Wild at Heart (1990), and the family film The Straight Story (1999) in the same period. Turning further towards surrealist filmmaking, three of his subsequent films operated on dream logic non-linear narrative structures: Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Frost reunited in 2017 for a third season of Twin Peaks, which aired on Showtime. Lynch co-wrote and directed every episode, and reprised his onscreen role as Gordon Cole.
Lynch's other artistic endeavors include his work as a musician, encompassing the studio albums BlueBOB (2001), Crazy Clown Time (2011), and The Big Dream (2013), as well as music and sound design for a variety of his films (sometimes alongside collaborators Alan Splet, Dean Hurley, and/or Angelo Badalamenti); painting and photography; writing the books Images (1994), Catching the Big Fish (2006), Room to Dream (2018), and numerous other literary works; and directing several music videos (such as the video for "Shot in the Back of the Head" by Moby, who, in turn, directed a video for Lynch's "The Big Dream") as well as advertisements, including the Dior promotional film Lady Blue Shanghai (2006). An avid practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM), in 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation, which seeks to fund the teaching of TM in schools and has since widened its scope to other at-risk populations, including the homeless, veterans and refugees.
The more you meditate the better life gets.
Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story, the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.
A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.
Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.
Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema.
I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I'm off into the darkness somewhere.
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.
Freedom. It's like no constraints, an opening, and then barriers going away and lifting and breaking and experimentation and...it's like attempting for something.
I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted.
I thought when I started meditation that I was going to get real calm and peaceful and it's going to be over. It's not that way; it's so energetic. That's where all the energy and creativity is.
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.
I felt I should have been the happiest person in the world. But I looked inside, and that happiness was only on the surface, not so deep. Beneath it was hollow. Up until that time, I had been thinking meditation was a joke, a fad and a waste of time.
I love the French. They're the biggest film buffs and protectors of cinema in the world. They really look out for the filmmaker and the rights of the filmmaker, and they believe in final cut.
Cigarettes are pretty much my worst vice, and I even stopped smoking for 20 years. I spend most of my free time with my family and working on art.
Mystery is the number one conjurer of ideas.
Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.
Anger, stress, tension, depression, sorrow, hate, fear -- these things start to retreat. And for a filmmaker, having this negativity lift away is money in the bank. When you're suffering you can't create.
I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.
I love seeing people come out of darkness.
We want to generate the electricity of peace through music, and it's a thrill to know that the super-creative, enthusiastic musicians of our world are with us to achieve this goal.
Building a set is like building a place, but it's a temporary place, because sets usually get torn down. Kind of unfortunate.
In a Town like Twin Peaks noone is innocent.
Individual peace is the unit of world peace.
I'm obsessed with textures. We're surrounded by so much vinyl that I find myself constantly in pursuit of other textures. One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair-Hair just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful.
Making a film is a beautiful mystery. You go deep into the wood, and you don't want to come out of that wood.
I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.
Longer Version:
I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That's why I love coffee shops and public places -- I mean, they're all out there.
Inside, we are ageless and when we talk to ourselves, it's the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It's the body that is changing around that ageless center.
The great coming to age of cable is really a beautiful thing. No commercials. It's like a small theater. It's a cinema on a TV screen.
The thing about meditation is: you become more and more you.
Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing.
Absurdity is what I like most in life.
Longer Version:
Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there's humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it would make you laugh because it becomes absurd.
The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.
One change of attitude would change everything. If everyone realized that it could be a beautiful world and said, 'let's not do these things anymore -- let's have fun.'
I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child.
Secrets and mysteries provide a beautiful corridor where you can float out. The corridor expands and many, many wonderful things can happen... I love the process of going into mystery.
I like things that go into hidden, mysterious places, places I want to explore that are very disturbing. In that disturbing thing, there is sometimes tremendous poetry and truth.
Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower.
There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery.
When the going gets tough, everyone leaves.
You get all the puzzle parts together enough to say the puzzle is complete. It's a script. In the process of realizing that, new ideas can come, one way or another. Through a happy accident, they just come to you.
Desire for an idea is like bait. When you're fishing, you have to have patience. You bait your hook, and then you wait. The desire is the bait that pulls those fish in-those ideas.
But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness.
Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business -- everything.
Been trying the soapy water and instant coffee method. Works somewhat, but boy it tastes terrible. I don't know how you guys can stand it. I'm going back to milk and espresso for my cappas.
I love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Most of Hollywood is about making money -- and I love money, but I don't make the films thinking about money.
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.
My movies are film-paintings -- moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood -- like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful.
It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.
I truly believe there is a field of peace within and that it can be enlivened and brought to the surface to be enjoyed by all.
I was creative before I started meditating, but I had, looking back, a weakness. I wasn't self-assured. I had a little bit of melancholy. I had a lot of anger for my situations in life, and I would take this out on my first wife.
You could say that spirituality is bliss, and bliss is physical happiness, emotional happiness, mental happiness, and spiritual happiness. And it's intense. It's an intense happiness. It brings you together with everything.
Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique, so you travel to this field through subtler levels of mind, and then subtler levels of intellect, and then, at the border of intellect, you transcend and experience it.
I hear heroin is a very popular drug these days.
I love two-lane highways. They say something about the way things used to be, and about areas that don't have a lot of people. On those two-lanes at night you get the sense of moving into the unknown, and that's as thrilling a sense as human beings can have.
The greatest thing my father left me was a love for cutting wood -- my love for sawing, especially pine wood.
The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.
Longer Version:
When you get an idea, so many things come in that one moment. You could write the sound of that idea, or the sound of the room it's in. You could write the clothes the character is wearing, what they're saying, how they move, what they look like. Instead of making up, you're actually catching an idea, for a story, characters, place, and mood -- all the stuff that comes. When you put a sound to something and it's wrong, it's so obvious. When it's right, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That's a magical thing that can happen in cinema.
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 started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within.
When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.
I just like going into strange worlds.
All my 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.
Be true to yourself. Don't take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.
When you practice Transcendental Meditation you are given a key to the deepest level of life.
If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.
My rule of thumb is, what Siskel and Ebert like, I don't, and vice versa.
The side effect of expanding consciousness is that negativity starts to evaporate; it goes away like darkness when you turn on a light.
Longer Version:
The side effect of expanding consciousness is that negativity starts to evaporate; it goes away like darkness when you turn on a light. Many students have so much torment, stress, depression, sorrow and hate in them these days, but then they get this technique and the negativity starts to go away. They start to feel good because the torment is leaving. Their health gets better and they get happier, their comprehension and their ability to focus grow, their grades go up and a joy for life grows; all of which comes from within.
If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that's all you can control. You can't control any of what's out there, outside yourself.
New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts.
Someday, hopefully very soon, 'diving within' as a preparation for learning and as a tool for developing the creative potential of the mind will be a standard part of every school's curriculum.
Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.
Death in my mind isn't a finality. There's a continuum: It's like at night, you go to sleep and in the daytime you wake up, or whenever you wake up, and it's a new day.
We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.