Quotes from David Lynch

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.

Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

You can understand conflict, but you don'thave to live in it.

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.

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

It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.

If you want to get one hour of good painting in, you have to have four hours of uninterrupted time.

That state of simplest form of awareness alone, is worthy of seeing, hearing, contemplating and realizing.

Inside, we are ageless...and when we talk to ourselves, it's the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It's the body that is changing around that ageless center.

There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.

I was doing something that had become a pattern in my life, and I thought, Well I should go talk to a psychiatrist. When I got into the room, I asked him, 'Do you think that this process could, in any way, damage my creativity?', And he said ´Well, David, I have to be honest; it could´ And I shook his hand and left.

Intuition is seeing the solution.....its emotion and intellect going together.

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.

But if you know that you've got to be somewhere in half an hour, there's no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There's not always a lot of time for other things.

It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening.

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.

If I had a type, I guess you could say I liked brunettes the best, and I kind of liked librarian types, you know, their outer appearance hiding smoldering heat inside….

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.

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

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It's emotion and intellect going together. That's essential for the filmmaker.

it's a truth of life that some things are not built so well and they become complicated and they need to be figured out and they're hard to figure out.

He whose happiness is within, whose contentment is within, whose light is all within, that yogi, being one with Brahman, attains eternal freedom in divine consciousness. BHAGAVAD-GITA

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate.

We all have at least two sides. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile those opposing things. I've always liked both sides. In order to appreciate one, you have to know the other. The more darkness you can gather up, the more light you can see too.