Top 250 David Lynch Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 6

201. “When you see an aging or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it – it’s so organic.”

— David Lynch

202. “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.”

— David Lynch

203. “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.”

— David Lynch

204. “I have the same answer all the time: My doctor told me not to think about these things.”

— David Lynch

205. “I love going into another world, and I love mysteries. So I don’t really like to know very much ahead of time. I like the feeling of dicovery.”

— David Lynch

206. “In today’s world of fear and uncertainty, every child should have one class period a day to dive within himself and experience the field of silence-bliss-t he enormous reservoir of energy and intelligence that is deep within all of us. This is the way to save the coming generation.”

— David Lynch

207. “As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things – we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.”

— David Lynch

208. “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.”

— David Lynch

209. “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.”

— David Lynch

210. “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.”

— David Lynch

211. “Every time I hear sounds, I see pictures. Then, I start getting ideas. It just drives me crazy.”

— David Lynch

212. “During the course of a day, some dark feeling comes, maybe some sadness comes, some thrill, some great happiness, some strange humor. Cinema can embrace all that in one story, just as the story of life.”

— David Lynch

213. “I have a profound admiration for Fellini. I met him lately and he’s just fantastic. I feel very close to him even though he’s very Italian. But his films could have been made in every country. When I say, I feel close to him, then also because we’re both born on January 20th.”

— David Lynch

214. “When you finish anything, people want you to then talk about it. And I think it’s almost like a crime. A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The words are not there. The language of film, cinema, is the language it was put into, and the English language – it’s not going to translate. It’s going to lose.”

— David Lynch

215. “It doesn’t do any good to say, ‘This is what it means.’ When you are spoon fed a film, people instantly know what it is. I like films that leave room to dream.”

— David Lynch

216. “Everyone is on the internet but they’re not all talking with each other. There are groups upon groups out there, but they don’t talk to one another. So while the internet brings everyone into a shared space, it does not necessarily bring them together.”

— David Lynch

217. “You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.”

— David Lynch

218. “I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I’m off into the darkness somewhere.”

— David Lynch

219. “The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you’re dead.”

— David Lynch

220. “Most of Hollywood is about making money – and I love money, but I don’t make the films thinking about money...”

— David Lynch

221. “There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.”

— David Lynch

222. “I don’t know how I got to that thing of not caring what other people think, but it’s a good thing. The thing is, you fall in love with ideas and it’s like falling in love with a girl. It could be a girl you wouldn’t want to take home to your parents, but you don’t care what anybody else thinks. You’re in love and it’s beautiful and you stay true to those things.”

— David Lynch

223. “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.”

— David Lynch

224. “I have to make what I see, whether it’s a painting, a table, or a movie, or it’s like a death and what would be the point of that?”

— David Lynch

225. “Transcendental meditation is like a car, a vehicle that allows you to go within. It’s a mental technique.”

— David Lynch

226. “A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It’s a horror. I can’t really listen to the music. I’m not really concentrating on it, and I’m not really concentrating on the painting.”

— David Lynch

227. “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.”

— David Lynch

228. “I’ve loved music always, and my music fire was lit by Elvis Presley, really, and all that was happening back then.”

— David Lynch

229. “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.”

— David Lynch

230. “Nowadays, people shoot digitally and it’s all in color, but you press a button and it all goes to black and white. But it’s not lit for black and white. So, it’s a tricky thing. If you’re going do black and white, you better remember to separate things with light, because color ain’t gonna be there.”

— David Lynch

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

— David Lynch

232. “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.”

— David Lynch

233. “I just love musicians. They’re not all super-happy all the time, but when they’re playing they’re happy, and it’s such a beautiful thing.”

— David Lynch

234. “I supported myself by delivering the ‘Wall Street Journal’ and doing odd jobs. I love plumbing and carpentry.”

— David Lynch

235. “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.”

— David Lynch

236. “The artist does not have to suffer to show suffering.”

— David Lynch

237. “You know what dogs are like in a room? They really look like they’re having fun. They’re bouncing this ball around and chewing on stuff and they’re kind of panting and happy. Human beings are supposed to be like that. We should be pretty happy. And I don’t know why we aren’t.”

— David Lynch

238. “It’s important that a film is loud and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theater. It should surround you, envelope you, so you can live inside a dream.”

— David Lynch

239. “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.”

— David Lynch

240. “It’s important to listen to lots of different genres because you never know when something will get born out of it.”

— David Lynch

241. “I think part of the reason ideas haven’t come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It’s experienced and then forgotten.”

— David Lynch

242. “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.”

— David Lynch

243. “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.”

— David Lynch

244. “Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of – or because of – his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great – I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”

— David Lynch

245. “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.”

— David Lynch

246. “You can understand conflict, but you don’thave to live in it.”

— David Lynch

247. “I’ve always loved the electric guitar: to hold it and work it and hear what it does is unreal.”

— David Lynch

248. “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.”

— David Lynch

249. “People think anger is an edge, but anger is a weakness that poisons you and the environment around you.”

— David Lynch

250. “In Lynch’s realm, America is like a river that flows ever forward, carrying odds and ends from one decade into the next, where they intermingle and blur the dividing lines we’ve invented to mark time.”

— David Lynch