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David Lynch

David Keith Lynch is an American film director, writer and actor.

Sourced

  • The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn't hurt that much. That's a real sickness to me. That's a real sick thing.

  • I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.
    • As quoted in "Dark Lens on America" in The New York Times Magazine (14 January 1990)

  • When you're an artist, you pick up on certain things that are in the air. You just feel it. It's not like you're sitting down, thinking, "What can I do to really mess things up?" You're getting ideas, and then the ideas feed into a story, and the story takes shape. And if you're honest about it and you're thinking about characters and what they do, you now see that your ideas are about trouble. You're feeling more depth, and you're describing something that is going on in some way.

  • In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point.
    • As quoted in "Lost Highway" interview by Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone (6 March 1997)

  • The beginning dictates the direction and you never know where you're going to go ... the mood is what you're looking for, and somehow we always find it.
    • As quoted in in Pretty as a Picture : The Art of David Lynch (1997)

  • When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home ... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.
    • As quoted in in Pretty as a Picture : The Art of David Lynch (1997)

  • There's this beautiful ocean of bliss and consciousness that is able to be reached by any human being by diving within, which is really peaceful and harmonious and can be enlivened by the group process. This group is a peace-creating group. It saturates the atmosphere. This is all about establishing peace. Right now, we gotta get peace back in the world. Peace is a real thing.

  • Speaking in front of a large crowd is not pleasant. Once it gets rolling, it's okay. But beforehand, it's murder. I'm getting a lot better. The first interview I ever did was in 1972, I believe, and I couldn't speak. I couldn't speak one word. I only said, "I painted it black." That was my one sentence. And so I have improved.

  • 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.

  • 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. Some change, simple, simple really, relatively speaking, and we're going forwards somewhere, you know? It could be a beautiful place. There's many little obstacles and there's many, many people that are just opposed and we're not going forward.
    • Scene by Scene interview BBC 2 (1999)


  • Life is very, very complicated and so films should be allowed to be too.
    • As quoted in The Los Angeles Times (20 April 2003)

  • 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.
    • As quoted in Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film (2004) by Joseph Maddrey, p. 160

  • It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It is 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 someone else.
    • As quoted in My Love Affair with David Lynch and Peachy Like Nietzsche: Dark Clown Porn Snuff for Terrorists and Gorefiends (2005) by Jason Rogers, p. 7

  • I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.
    • As quoted in My Love Affair with David Lynch and Peachy Like Nietzsche: Dark Clown Porn Snuff for Terrorists and Gorefiends (2005) by Jason Rogers, p. 7


  • 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."
    • On the Alex Jones Radio show, as quoted in "David Lynch Questions 9/11 On National U.S. Radio" in Prison Planet (25 January 2007)



McKenna interview (1992)

Interview with Kristine McKenna (1992-08-03)

  • 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.

  • I guess I got whacked hard in the mystery department when I was little. I found the world completely and totally fascinating then — it was like a dream. They say that people who think they had a happy childhood are blocking something out, but I think I really had one. Of course I had the usual fears, like going to school — I knew there was some sort of problem there. But every other person sensed that problem too, so my fears were pretty normal.


  • There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery. It's possible to achieve a state where you realize the truth of life and fear disappears, and a lot of people have reached that state, but next to none of them are on Earth. There's probably a few.

  • Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower. People lived in towns and small farms where they knew everybody and people didn't move around so much so things were a little more peaceful. There were things that they were afraid of for sure, but now it's accelerated to where the anxiety level of the people is in the stratosphere. TV sped things up and caused people to hear way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people with more than they could handle, and drugs also had a lot to do with it. With drugs people can get so rich and whacked out and they've opened up a whole weird world. These things have created a modern kind of fear in America.

  • One change of attitude would change everything. If everyone realized that it could be a beautiful world and said let's not do these things anymore — let's have fun.

  • There are so many clues and feelings in the world that it makes a mystery and a mystery means there's a puzzle to be solved. Once you think like that you're hooked on probably finding a meaning, and there' many avenues in life where we're given little indications that the mystery can one day be solved. we get little proofs, — not the big proof — but the little proofs that keep us searching.

  • When you do something that works you have a happiness, but I don't know if it's a feeling of power. Power is a frightening thing and that's not what I'm interested in. I want to do certain things and make them right in my mind and that's it.

Unsourced

  • 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.

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

Quotes about Lynch


  • You feel David in his movies — its another universe he takes you to — its an alternate reality but its close enough to our own that its scary.
    • Patricia Arquette in Pretty as a Picture : The Art of David Lynch (1997)

  • It's great when somebody breaks rules and says, "You know what? There doesn't have to be an answer to this. You don't have to have a fourth wall, you don't have to have any boundaries."
    • Patricia Arquette in Pretty as a Picture : The Art of David Lynch (1997)


  • One day he was showing me a painting he made. It was thick with oil, and right as he showed it to me a moth flew into the painting and got stuck — it flew around and its wings created a little circle in his painting, sort of like the death of a moth ... I thought David would pull the moth out and repaint it, but he fell in love with it the way it was.
    • Jack Fisk, in Pretty as a Picture : The Art of David Lynch (1997)


  • Most people have strange thoughts, but they rationalize them. David doesn't translate his images logically, so they remain raw, emotional. Whenever I ask him where his ideas come from, he says it's like fishing. He never knows what he's going to catch.
 
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