Top 250 David Lynch Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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.”

— David Lynch

202. “Many of the things I see in the world seem very beautiful, but it’s still hard for me to figure out how things can be the way they are, and I guess that’s one of the reasons why my movies tend to be open to many different interpretations.”

— David Lynch

203. “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.”

— David Lynch

204. “I like to feel like you can bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to hurt them. I like to feel like I’m painting with my teeth.”

— David Lynch

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

— 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. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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. “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

215. “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

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

— David Lynch

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— David Lynch

222. “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

223. “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

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. “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

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. “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

229. “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

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

— David Lynch

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

— David Lynch

232. “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

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

— David Lynch

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— David Lynch

238. “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

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

— David Lynch

240. “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

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. “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

243. “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

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

— David Lynch

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

— David Lynch

246. “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

247. “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

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

— David Lynch

249. “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

250. “These so-called bleak times are necessary to go through in order to get to a much, much better place.”

— David Lynch