I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

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.'

As a teenager, I was really trying to have fun 24 hours a day. I didn't start thinking until I was 20 or 21. I was doing regular goof-ball stuff.

I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.

Music has fed me a lot of ideas... The film BLUE VELVET came out of Bobby Vinton's version of the song BLUE VELVET.

I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow - you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.