Quotes from David Lynch

I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful.

Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.

We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything.

I quit smoking in December. I'm really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist's life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.

My cow is not pretty, but it is pretty to me.

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.

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.

It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.

Black has depth.. you can go into it.. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream.

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

Everything I learned in my life, I learned because I decided to try something new.

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery

Float with me in the world of ether.

Don't fight the darkness. Don't even worry about the darkness. Turn on the light and the darkness goes. Turn up that light of pure consciousness: Negativity goes.

Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.

People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you're in love with, but you know she's not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things.

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.

We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.