David Lynch Quotes

“A homeless person doesn’t have a home. Because they don’t have a home they don’t have a shelter. Because they don’t have a shelter they’re a victim of the elements. Homeless people don’t get to bathe too often and they’re sunburnt a lot of times, they’re dirty because they don’t have a place to get cleaned up and they might start getting an odour. These are general, stereotypical things that you notice but all those things could be taken care of pretty quickly if they had some help.”

“Absurdity is what I like most in life.”

“As you know if you ever fished, you have to have patience – some days you catch some, some days you don’t. I am fishing now, and I’m gathering fish together, but I haven’t started cooking them.”

“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.”

“Even though I’ve never been a factory worker, for some reason I just love the idea of smokestacks, fire, the brick, the narrow streets, the whole factory life.”

“Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it. Don’t wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.”

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

“I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we’ll all meet again.”

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

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

“I don’t like going out anyway. I like to stay at home. Of course I do think it’s important sometimes to go out and see new things and feel the so-called reality. And that can conjure ideas. But I think human beings can sense the air and feel what’s going on in the world without going out.”

“I don’t like to go out. I do go out, but I don’t like it. But many times I don’t want to go out and then I’m forced to go out and I enjoy myself when I’m out. Getting enough strength to walk out the door sometimes is tricky.”

“I don’t think that people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable.”

“I feel we’ve been in very dark times and much better times are coming. The thing is, bad news sells, frightening things sell, sensationalism sells. So we don’t hear all the good news that’s happening, because it seems kind of boring.”

“I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.

Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.”

“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.”

“I think, in a way, the chickens are coming home to roost for America. I don’t know what percentage are working towards making it better, but there’s a huge percentage that’s being diverted into escape, into sports or movies or music, into drugs. The drugs have ruined so much.”

“I write to remember. I always say: write down the idea in such a way that when you read it again the idea comes back in full.

So a script is for getting the ideas down, but it’s not the final thing at all. It’s to remind you of the idea, which could be much more full than what the words actually are saying.

For instance, the script has no sound to it. It’s just ideas.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Negativity is the enemy of creativity.”

“On the surface we’re all different, at the base we’re all the same.”

“Playing the movie on a telephone, you will never, in a trillion years, experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated.

It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your f*cking telephone. Get real.”

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

“The film is the thing. You work so hard to get, you know, after the ideas come, to get this thing built, all the elements to feel correct, the whole to feel correct, in this beautiful language called cinema.

And the second it’s finished, people want you to change it back into words. And it’s very, very saddening. It’s torture.”

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

“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.”

“There’s nothing like the big screen. 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.”