150 Quotes by David Lynch

There is this unbounded, infinite, eternal, level, ocean, within every human being. Inner happiness comes with consciousness, bliss, intelligence comes with it. Creativity, love.

Human beings have a potential and it has names like enlightenment or fulfilment, or liberation.

True happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.

They say beauty is only skin deep but it's this stuff coming from the inside, absolute vibrant consciousness, absolute bliss"

I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

I like things that go into hidden, mysterious places, places I want to explore that are very disturbing. In that disturbing thing, there is sometimes tremendous poetry and truth.

This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.

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.

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You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

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

Mankind was not meant to suffer -- bliss is our nature. The individual is cosmic. Let's rock.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

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

We only dream of images we already have inside of us.

The more unknowable the mystery, the more beautiful it is.

New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.

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Meditation is not a selfish thing. Even though you're diving in and experiencing the Self, you're not closing yourself off from the world. You're strengthening yourself, so that you can be more effective when you go back into the world.

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.

All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds.

This is a donut. It is very sweet, and very good. But if you've never tasted a donut, you wouldn't really know how sweet and how good a donut is... meditation is like that. Transcendental Meditation gives an experience much sweeter than the sweetness of this donut.

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.

Many things happen that we don't know the significance of until a little bit later.

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

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas. But wood can translate ideas, too. You have wood and then you get a chair. Some ideas are for different things.

If you have a golf-ball-sized consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf-ball-sized understanding; when you look out a window, a golf-ball-sized awareness, when you wake up in the morning, a golf-ball-sized wakefulness; and as you go about your day, a golf-ball-sized inner happiness. But if you can expand that consciousness, make it grow, then when you read about that book, you'll have more understanding; when you look out, more awareness; when you wake up, more wakefulness; as you go about your day, more inner happiness.

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

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. Feeling correct is a feeling I think everyone knows.

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.

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract.

I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

I like making films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost into another world.

You don't dive for specific solutions; you dive to enliven that ocean of consciousness. Then your intuition grows and you have a way of solving those problems-knowing when it's not quite right and knowing a way to make it feel correct for you. That capacity grows and things go much more smoothly.

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.

Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

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

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.

I just like going into strange worlds.

Lately I feel films are more and more like music. Music deals with abstractions and, like film, it involves time. It has many different movements, it has much contrast. And through music you learn that, in order to get a particular beautiful feeling, you have to have started far back, arranging certain things in a certain way. You can't just cut to it.

Be true to yourself. Don't take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.

The day you catch an idea you fall in love with, even a small one, is a beautiful day.

Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It’s people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It’s a beautiful thing.

We want to generate the electricity of peace through music, and it’s a thrill to know that the super-creative, enthusiastic musicians of our world are with us to achieve this goal.

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

I love seeing people come out of darkness.

Intuition is knowingness, and this field of unbounded knowing, of knowingness, is within every human being. You start tapping into that and it becomes an ocean of solutions.

I like the saying: "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same - the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds - every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.

There is an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness inside each one of us.

Instead of instilling fear, if a company offered a way for everyone in the business to dive within-to start expanding energy and intelligence-people would work overtime for free. They would be far more creative. And the company would just leap forward. This is the way it can be. It's not the way it is, but it could be that way so easily.

When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.

You don't need a special place to meditate. You can transcend anywhere in the world. The unified field is here, and there, and everywhere.

Negativity is the enemy of creativity.

There is an ocean of creativity within every human being.

They say the full potential of the human being is called enlightenment, which is infinite consciousness, infinite happiness, zero negativity, zero dying, complete freedom, total fulfillment, and being at one with everything. You can say it's God realization, or you can say you sit at the feet of the Lord as master of all you survey. You could say it's totality, total knowledge, and that you are that totality. This is every human being's birthright: to one day enjoy supreme enlightenment, unity. It's like the big graduation.

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.

We're all like detectives. We want to figure things out. Life, you know, we want to figure out life, and we want to figure out what's going on, so it's beautiful. It's beautiful that people are thinking.

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. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it. I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime there’s suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it’s people kind of going in circles. It’s fantastic. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain.

I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we're all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.

The world is as you are.

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.

I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla.

Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.

The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.

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.

Every single person has within an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness. Every single human being can experience that - infinite intelligence, infinite creativity, infinite happiness, infinite energy, infinite dynamic peace.

Everyone's got consciousness.. . Grow that ball of consciousness and all avenues of life improve. Your work just blossoms.

I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

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

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.

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.

I love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.

Ideas are floating like fish. Desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. If you desire an idea, it pulls and it makes a kind of a bait. Ideas will come swimming up. And you don't know them until they enter the conscious mind. And then bingo! There it is! You know it instantly. And then more come in. If you go fishing for ideas, a lot of ideas will just pop in. And one of them will make you fall in love.

Domestic violence and violence against women in general seems to be a big problem everywhere in the world. It seems to me this problem comes from stress, pent up anger, frustration, and all kinds of negativity within human beings.

Everybody's got creativity. You just get more of it [when you meditate].

What do you fear, most of all? The possibility that love may not be enough.

They say that negative things like stress, anxiety, tension, sorrow, and depression "squeeze the tube" so ideas don't flow through it. But if you get rid of that negativity, which goes away naturally when you transcend every day, these ideas are more freely flowing, and you get happy in the doing. You get fresh and inspiring ideas, and a bigger picture starts to emerge of the world and life. It's very good for the artist, businessman, fisherman, and any kind of person really.

My childhood was elegant homes, tree lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow – and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

I truly believe there is a field of peace within and that it can be enlivened and brought to the surface to be enjoyed by all.

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images.

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. That's why I love coffee shops and public places - I mean, they're all out there.

The thing about meditation is: you become more and more you.

Secrets and mysteries provide a beautiful corridor where you can float out. The corridor expands and many, many wonderful things can happen. I love the process of going into mystery.

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.

Somewhere in talking and rehearsing, there is a magical moment where actors catch a current, they're on the right road. If they really catch it, then whatever they do from then on is correct and it all comes out of them from that point on.

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.

If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.

You're right on the money with that. We're all like detectives in life. There's something at the end of the trail that we're all looking for.

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.

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.

In my mind it's so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious - something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon-fed to you. That's the beauty of cinema, and it's hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people's minds stop working.

Every single thing in the world that was made by anyone started with an idea. So to catch one that is powerful enough to fall in love with, it is one of the most beautiful experiences. It's like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time.

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.

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

If you keep your eye on the doughnut and do your work, that's all you can control. You can't control any of what's out there, outside yourself.

So much of what happened to me is good fortune. But I would say: Try to get a job that gives you some time; get your sleep and a little bit of food; and work as much as you can. There's so much enjoyment in doing what you love. Maybe this will open doors, and you'll find a way to do what you love.

Man is evolving...but it's difficult to see his progress with a Western perception of time. The Hindus think of time in much larger segments. They watch the hour hand of the clock while we in the West are preoccupied with the second hand.

When we transcend we are diving into a field of unbounded creativity. This is real creativity and when we experience that and grow in that, we can more easily find solutions to problems. We can get ideas for whatever it is we're working on. And we will get happier by transcending every day and we will find that we're happier doing almost anything. We'll get more energy to do our work.

Mystery is the number one conjurer of ideas.

In the world there's a thing called collective consciousness. All of us billions of human beings together create that collective consciousness. With all the problems in our world, you can see that the collective consciousness is not so high.

The ideas dictate everything.

The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.

A film is its own thing and in an ideal world I think a film should be discovered knowing nothing and nothing should be added to it and nothing should be subtracted from it.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

There's so many problems in our world, so much negativity. Don't worry about the darkness - turn on the light and the darkness automatically goes. Ramp up the light of unity within - help do that for yourself, help do that for the world and then we're really doing something, we're doing something that brings that light of unity.

When you're down, when you've been kicked down in the street and then kicked a few more times until you're bleeding and your teeth are out, then you only have up to go. You get reborn again, and expectations aren't so great because they've taken you away. It's beautiful to be down there. It's so beautiful!

The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.

I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow - you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

As collective consciousness goes higher and higher, all the differences in the world will be appreciated more and more. A definition of peace is unity in the midst of diversity. Or you could say happiness, love, and peace in the midst of all diversity. All the differences would be appreciated fully in the light of this peace.

I'm not any different than anybody else. But I do see a world, for me, that's getting better and better, not worse and worse. And I believe that world peace is coming quicker than we think. And I believe that people are not only yearning for it but will see a way to get it and help that way to come sooner. And it's going to be beautiful.

Forget being the best of anything. That's the fruit of the action, and you do the work -they say- for the doing, not the fruit. You can never really know how it's gonna turn out in the world but you know if you enjoy doing it. And ideas start flowing and you start getting, you know, excited about stuff. Then you're having a great time in the doing and that's what it's all about. If you don't enjoy the doing, then do something else.

The big treasury is an ocean of infinite creativity. It's a creativity that creates everything that is a thing - it's mighty powerful creativity.

Sugar does make people happy, but then you fall off the edge after a few minutes, so I've really pretty much cut it out of my diet. Except for cupcakes. I like those.

I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted.

Life holds many, many, many mysteries, abstract things we all think about. In a film when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people. I like a film, a story that holds concrete things but also abstractions. So when ideas come along that have those things, I'm falling in love and going to work.

I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything.

Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day.

See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There's really nothing to be afraid of.

I'm not a real film buff. Unfortunately, I don't have time. I just don't go. And I become very nervous when I go to a film because I worry so much about the director and it is hard for me to digest my popcorn.

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 - the enormous reservoir of energy and intelligence that is deep within all of us. This is the way to save the coming generation.

Float with me in the world of ether.

I'm lost in a transition. The old is dead, and I don't know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there's something that can come out of experimentation. It's somewhat unsettling, but it's a hopeful thing in a way. I've been here before, lots of times.

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.

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.

I love two-lane highways. They say something about the way things used to be, and about areas that don't have a lot of people. On those two-lanes at night you get the sense of moving into the unknown, and that's as thrilling a sense as human beings can have.

The artist does not have to suffer to show suffering.

I'm not a political person. I don't understand politics, I don't understand the concept of two sides and I think that probably there's good on both sides, bad on both sides, and there's a middle ground, but it never seems to come to the middle ground and it's very frustrating watching it and seemingly we're not moving forward.

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 in fact, that usually kills it because people don't want to see sex so much as they want to experience the emotions that go along with it. These things are hard to convey in film because sex is such a mystery.

Yes, Philadelphia is horrible, but in a very interesting way. There were places there that had been allowed to decay, where there was so much fear and crime that just for a moment there was an opening to another world. It was fear, but it was so strong, and so magical, like a magnet, that your imagination was always sparking in PhiladelphiaI just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I'm off into the darkness somewhere.

I'm obsessed with textures. We're surrounded by so much vinyl that I find myself constantly in pursuit of other textures. One time I removed all the hair from a mouse with Nair-Hair just to see what it looked like. And it looked beautiful.

Every human being has consciousness, but not every human being has the same amount. The potential for each one of us human beings is infinite consciousness. This is called supreme enlightenment, and it just needs unfolding by transcending each day. The more consciousness we have, the better life is.

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.

Individual peace is the unit of world peace.

I'm not a musician, but I play music. So it's a strange thing.

I've said many, many, many unkind things about Philadelphia, and I meant every one.

I'm responsible for what people see and what they hear.

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.

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.

The greatest thing my father left me was a love for cutting wood - my love for sawing, especially pine wood.

Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me.