110+ David Lynch Quotes On Creativity, Dreams And Art

David Lynch is an American filmmaker, director, and visual artist. He is best known for his surrealist films and his work in the horror and thriller genres. His most famous works include Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive. Following is our collection on famous quotes by David Lynch on creativity, dreams, love.

Top 10 David Lynch Quotes

1. I like cappuccino, actually. But even a bad cup of coffee is better than no coffee at all.
2. This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.
3. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.
4. It's so freeing, it's beautiful in a way, to have a great failure, there's nowhere to go but up.
5. Absurdity is what I like most in life.
6. New mysteries. New day. Fresh doughnuts.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.
10. Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see, one chance out between two worlds, fire walk with me!

David Lynch Image Quotes

Absurdity is what I like most in life. — David Lynch

David Lynch Short Quotes

• Be true to yourself. Don't take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.
• When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.
• Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual.
• Every time I hear sounds, I see pictures. Then, I start getting ideas. It just drives me crazy
• The only thing that disturbs me is that many psychopaths say they had a very happy childhood.
• The concept of absurdity is something I'm attracted to.
• If a scene isn't honest, it stands out like a sore thumb.
• The thing about meditation is: you become more and more you.
• There's always fear of the unknown where there's mystery.
• The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you're dead.

David Lynch Quotes About Creativity

I started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

Negativity is the enemy of creativity. For instance if you're filled with depression, you can hardly even get out of bed, let alone feel like creating something. If you are filled with bitter, selfish anger, this occupies the mind and leaves little room for creative ideas. — David Lynch

I was creative before I started meditating, but I had, looking back, a weakness. I wasn't self-assured. I had a little bit of melancholy. I had a lot of anger for my situations in life, and I would take this out on my first wife. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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

Someday, hopefully very soon, 'diving within' as a preparation for learning and as a tool for developing the creative potential of the mind will be a standard part of every school’s curriculum. — David Lynch

There is an ocean of creativity within every human being. — David Lynch

David Lynch Quotes About Dreams

When you sleep, you don`t control your dream. I like to dive into a dream world that I've made, a world I chose and that I have complete control over. — David Lynch

I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you. — David Lynch

Chrysta Bell looks like a dream and Chrysta Bell sings like a dream. And the dream is coming true. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream... allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film. — David Lynch

We only dream of images we already have inside of us. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

Sometimes film kills the room to dream. — David Lynch

The nervous system functions in a fourth, unique way, as different as dreaming is from sleeping as sleeping is from waking. When you transcend, it's the only experience that lights the full brain on an EEG machine. It's the only experience that utilizes the full brain. — David Lynch

David Lynch Quotes About Love

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

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

I just love musicians. They're not all super-happy all the time, but when they're playing they're happy, and it's such a beautiful thing. — David Lynch

When you get an idea and you fall in love with it there's not a whole lot of choice. You're going down a street and you meet this girl and you know it doesn't have to make any sense. Bingo! You're in love. — David Lynch

I think true love is not only true personal love but totality of love, universal love - to be in love with everything manifest and everything unmanifest. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. — David Lynch

David Lynch Quotes About Art

The feature film has changed a lot. Art houses are gone and people show a certain type of cinema in the big theaters now that, you know, it's not quite really good for me, and if I made a feature film, I was think I'd play in LA and New York for a week, and then go right to television. — David Lynch

Cigarettes are pretty much my worst vice, and I even stopped smoking for 20 years. I spend most of my free time with my family and working on art. — David Lynch

Well, I've been blessed with good hair, or at least some people think it is. It is the way it is, sort of does what it wants to. So, yeah, I guess it is [a metaphor for your views on art and life]. — David Lynch

I have smoked marijuana, but I no longer do. I went to art school in the 1960s so you can imagine what was going on. Yet my friends were the ones who said, "No, no, no, David, don't take those drugs." I was pretty lucky. — David Lynch

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

David Lynch Quotes About World

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. — David Lynch

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

I just like going into strange worlds. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

I have been 'diving within' through the Transcendental Meditation technique for over 30 years. It has changed my life, my world. I am not alone. Millions of other people of all ages, religions, and walks of life practice the technique and enjoy incredible benefits. — David Lynch

Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

David Lynch Quotes About Life

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

Sex was like a world so mysterious to me, I really couldn't believe there was this fantastic texture to life that I was getting to do...it has all these different levels, from lust and fearful, violent sex to the real spiritual thing at the other end. It's the key to some fantastic mystery of life. — David Lynch

Transcendental Meditation is not a religion, it's not against any religion, it's for human beings, no matter what color, what religion, what walk of life. If you're a human being, it will work for you. And you will be very glad you found this technique and took advantage of it. — David Lynch

Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

With each experience of the unbounded ocean of consciousness, you infuse it into your life and therefore expand whatever consciousness you had to begin with. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

David Lynch Quotes About Story

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. — David Lynch

I didn't watch much TV as a kid and I don' t watch it now. I don' t find anything beautiful or unique to the medium, and the only thing you can do on TV that you can't do in film is make a continuing story - which is so cool! — David Lynch

I've seen so many cases where lives have been transformed for the good and heard so many stories about this. The technique of Transcendental Meditation really works for the human being. — David Lynch

David Lynch Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — David Lynch

Absurdity is what I like most in life. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

Been trying the soapy water and instant coffee method. Works somewhat, but boy it tastes terrible. I don't know how you guys can stand it. I'm going back to milk and espresso for my cappas. — David Lynch

Death in my mind isn't a finality. There's a continuum: It's like at night, you go to sleep and in the daytime you wake up, or whenever you wake up, and it's a new day. — David Lynch

A lot of musicians like to do the bass and the drums with analog and get that tape distortion that's really beautiful. As far as the digital world goes - it's all going to end up there anyway, but when you hear vinyl it does a different thing to you. Nowadays, people do CDs and then vinyl so it's everything goes; it's a such a beautiful world. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

If a human being is filled with happiness and positivity, this is what they radiate out into the world. We each affect our environment and that collective consciousness. The more people who are diving within and transcending and are getting that happiness and positivity, the better the world will be. — David Lynch

Transcending gives a human being a chance to think before acting. And experiencing this beautiful treasury within gets rid of torment and replaces it with happiness, inner peace, creativity intelligence, love, energy. This fuels a real good life and fuels an appreciation for all human beings. It's so powerful and it's a blessing for humanity. — David Lynch

I'm not really into vinyl. There's something about that raw, birth of rock and roll feel that makes me crazy. — David Lynch

Script is not finished until it's finished. There's many times, partway through a film, when an idea comes, and I say, "How beautiful this is. This thing was not complete and look what's happened, look what's come along." And it just came along at what might be called a strange time rather than a normal time. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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

You could say that spirituality is bliss, and bliss is physical happiness, emotional happiness, mental happiness, and spiritual happiness. And it's intense. It's an intense happiness. It brings you together with everything. — David Lynch

Some people grew up in the '70s, powerful, beautiful memories of the '70s which to me is one of the worst decades. It has something to do with that. Has something to with the birth of rock 'n' roll, and something to do with those American cars. an incredible design. There was so much optimism at that time and it must leak into the process. — David Lynch

Music has fed me a lot of ideas... The film BLUE VELVET came out of Bobby Vinton's version of the song BLUE VELVET. — David Lynch

The mantra that you're given in Transcendental Meditation you keep to yourself. The reason being, true happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within. — David Lynch

My movies are film-paintings - moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood -- like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful. — David Lynch

Anger, stress, tension, depression, sorrow, hate, fear - these things start to retreat. And for a filmmaker, having this negativity lift away is money in the bank. When you're suffering you can't create. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

Consciousness-based education, which I am helping to promote, is basically the same education that good schools are giving today with Transcendental Meditation added for the students, teachers, staff, and principal. — David Lynch

Transcendental Meditation is a mental technique, so you travel to this field through subtler levels of mind, and then subtler levels of intellect, and then, at the border of intellect, you transcend and experience it. — David Lynch

The artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. Have it on the screen but have the people come out of the theater into a world of peace, of a beautiful world. They don't have to suffer in their lives. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

It's important to listen to lots of different genres because you never know when something will get born out of it. — David Lynch

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity. — David Lynch

You get all the puzzle parts together enough to say the puzzle is complete. It's a script. In the process of realizing that, new ideas can come, one way or another. Through a happy accident, they just come to you. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

True happiness is not out there. True happiness lies within. — David Lynch

I'm convinced we all are voyeurs. It's part of the detective thing. We want to know secrets and we want to know what goes on behind those windows. And not in a way that we would use to hurt anyone. There's an entertainment value to it, but at the same time we want to know: What do humans do? Do they do the same things as I do? It's a gaining of some sort of knowledge, I think. — David Lynch

I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had. — David Lynch

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

The human being is like a light bulb. If a human being is super stressed, depressed and filled with negativity, this is what that human being radiates out into the world. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

Let's get rid of the suffering and bring real peace, which is not just the absence of war, but the absence of all negativity. — David Lynch

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. — David Lynch

I didn't know anything about film when I first started - I was a painter - but I [always] felt that sound was just as important as the picture. The sound, picture, and ideas have to marry. If an idea carries with it a mood, sound is critical to making that mood. — David Lynch

The interesting thing that happens for many people when they first start meditating is that they'll be doing it for a few months, and they will begin to change, but the experience is so subtle that they're not even aware of it. — David Lynch

I have a profound admiration for Fellini. I met him lately and he's just fantastic. I feel very close to him even though he's very Italian. But his films could have been made in every country. When I say, I feel close to him, then also because we're both born on January 20th. — David Lynch

Individual peace is the unit of world peace. — David Lynch

I don't really follow television so much, but in the old days there was a certain way TV was, and it wasn't really like cinema. I don't know how many ways it was different or the same, but it was not quite like cinema. Now, cinema can happen on television. — David Lynch

Life Lessons by David Lynch

1. David Lynch teaches us to embrace the beauty of the unknown and to embrace the surreal and the strange. He encourages us to explore our own creative potential and to be open to the unexpected.
2. He also encourages us to be mindful of our innermost thoughts and feelings, and to take the time to reflect on our experiences and our lives.
3. Finally, he teaches us to be patient and to trust the creative process, even when it doesn't make sense.