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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“These days the world is filled with a lot of stress and people suffer from this stress and negativity. The practice of transcendental meditation starts rapidly folding the full potential of the human being – enlightenment. Doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, homeless, when you walk towards the light each step things get brighter. It’s so beautiful to see what happens to a person when they walk away from suffering. Even if they’re homeless they start feeling happy inside, regardless of the outside circumstance.”

“We have a treasury within. This is the biggest, the most beautiful home. It’s unbounded, infinite, eternal, immutable, immortal treasury, but we’ve lost contact. You’ve got the gold in the vault but if you don’t have the key to open up the door you’re not going to get that gold out. That vault can be seen as a home, a beautiful home, the self. The feeling of the home, money can’t buy that. It’s bliss. There’s a line, know thyself. This is the self they’re talking about.”

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

“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.”

“When you have a certain regimen, certain things you wear, you don’t have to worry, you just do it then it leaves more time to daydream and think. It’s to help the work.”

“You never know when ideas are going to hit you. You can get ideas just from sitting in a room daydreaming, just feeling the air. I think people are like radios. They pick up signals. But sometimes you go to a new place and that will give you ideas. Sometimes you go to a new place – no ideas. You never know what’s going to trigger the ideas you fall in love with.”