Quotes from David Lynch

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.

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.

What you're reading here is basically a person having a conversation with his own biography.

you keep your eye on the donut not the hole.

I love the French. They're the biggest film buffs and protectors of cinema in the world. They really look out for the filmmaker and the rights of the filmmaker, and they believe in final cut.

A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.

Human consciousness is too vast to fit between the covers of a book, and every experience has too many facets to count.

Certain aspects of sex are troubling—the way it's used as power, or the way it takes the form of perversions that exploit other people...Sex is a doorway to something so powerful and mystical, but movies usually depict it in a completely flat way. Being explicit doesn't tap into the mystical aspect of it, either. These things are hard to convey in film because sex is such a mystery.

Someone might say, I don't understand music; but most people experience music emotionally and would agree that music is an abstraction. You don't need to put music into words right away--you just listen. Cinema is a lot like music. It can be very abstract, but people have a yearning to make intellectual sense of it, to put it right into words.

Ultimately, each life is a mystery until we each solve the mystery, and that's where we are all headed whether we know it or not.

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.

about cinema) It's like opening a door and go into a new world.

What a great time to be alive if you love the theater of the absurd!

Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it.

Jennifer Lynch: My father deeply loved both of his parents, but he also despised all that goodness, the white picket fence and all that. He has a romantic idea of that stuff, but he also hated it because he wanted to smoke cigarettes and live the art life, and they went to church and everything was perfect and quiet and good. It made him a little nutty.

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.

It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments... In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song—Bobby Vinton's version of 'Blue Velvet.' The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.

Ideas are like fish. You don't make the fish, you catch the fish.

Bushnell helped a lot during those years, but, generally, being a teenager wasn't that great for me. Being a teenager is so euphoric and thrilling, but it's mixed with a kind of chain to jail, which is high school. It's such a torment.

I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think. 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.

Look at Van Gogh - The guy could not sell one painting and now nobody can afford them

Actors are so filled with wonder and imagination that when they get it, they get it real quick, no matter how strange something is; they get it, and their talent is to make it real from a deep place. When that happens it's really, really beautiful.

Actors are so filled with wonder and imagination and they get it so quick, no matter how strange something is. They get it, and their talent is to make it real from a deep place. When that happens it's really, really beautiful.

You know whatdogs 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.