David Lynch Quotes

I think that commercials can really ruin a song. You know that the person sold the song for a good deal of money, and that was the tradeoff. But, music and picture can marry in a beautiful way, and the reverse also.

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

If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness, when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness. 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.

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're right on the money with that. We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.

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.

The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.

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.

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.

Tied to consciousness are all positive qualities, so that ocean within is an ocean of unbounded intelligence, unbounded creativity, unbounded happiness, unbounded love, unbounded energy, and unbounded peace. And when students start expanding consciousness in those positive qualities, their relationships improve, their grades go up, their happiness goes up, the fighting and bullying stops, and things get very, very, very good.

I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories.

We're all like detectives. We want to figure things out. Life, you know, we want to figure out life, and we want to figure out what's going on, so it's beautiful. It's beautiful that people are thinking.

My rule of thumb is, what Siskel and Ebert like, I don't, and vice versa.

In my mind it's so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious - something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon-fed to you. That's the beauty of cinema, and it's hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people's minds stop working.

They say that negative things like stress, anxiety, tension, sorrow, and depression "squeeze the tube" so ideas don't flow through it. But if you get rid of that negativity, which goes away naturally when you transcend every day, these ideas are more freely flowing, and you get happy in the doing. You get fresh and inspiring ideas, and a bigger picture starts to emerge of the world and life. It's very good for the artist, businessman, fisherman, and any kind of person really.

I hear heroin is a very popular drug these days.

I'm not a musician, but I play music. So it's a strange thing.

Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract.

The artist does not have to suffer to show suffering.

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way the really are.

This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.

In the world there's a thing called collective consciousness. All of us billions of human beings together create that collective consciousness. With all the problems in our world, you can see that the collective consciousness is not so high.

I was raised Presbyterian, but I'm not really going to church. I think the experience in meditation is pretty much where it's at for me.

An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well.

I've seen so many cases where lives have been transformed for the good and heard so many stories about this. The technique of Transcendental Meditation really works for the human being.

If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.

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.

Domestic violence and violence against women in general seems to be a big problem everywhere in the world. It seems to me this problem comes from stress, pent up anger, frustration, and all kinds of negativity within human beings.

I love seeing people come out of darkness.

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.

I like the saying: "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same - the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds - every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

I love music, of course, and many, many, many genres. There are hardly any songs I would say that I hate. There's a couple, and I don't even know exactly why I don't like them.

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images.

I like things to be orderly.

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

I have been 'diving within' through the Transcendental Meditation technique for over 30 years. It has changed my life, my world. I am not alone. Millions of other people of all ages, religions, and walks of life practice the technique and enjoy incredible benefits.

Francis Bacon is one of my giant inspirations. I just love him to pieces.

I just like going into strange worlds.

So much of what happened to me is good fortune. But I would say: Try to get a job that gives you some time; get your sleep and a little bit of food; and work as much as you can. There's so much enjoyment in doing what you love. Maybe this will open doors, and you'll find a way to do what you love.

I didn't know anything about film when I first started - I was a painter - but I [always] felt that sound was just as important as the picture. The sound, picture, and ideas have to marry. If an idea carries with it a mood, sound is critical to making that mood.

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.

The nervous system functions in a fourth, unique way, as different as dreaming is from sleeping as sleeping is from waking. When you transcend, it's the only experience that lights the full brain on an EEG machine. It's the only experience that utilizes the full brain.

Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way.

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.

What do you fear, most of all? The possibility that love may not be enough.

When you do something that works you have a happiness, but I don't know if it's a feeling of power. Power is a frightening thing and that's not what I'm interested in. I want to do certain things and make them right in my mind and that's it.

I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.