I’ve been reading a biography on David Lynch lately. That got me to reading interviews and media outtakes over the years.

First of all, I’m somewhat amazed at how prosaic his life really is. Actors and artists who spend time with David Lynch reflect on how normal of a guy he is, right down to the fact his favorite meal is a quarter pounder from McDonald’s.

That’s hard to reconcile with David Lynch’s films. Once you start to read what the 60-something director has to say about his career, his take on Hollywood, and his philosophy of life, it’s hard to imagine him as “just another guy”.  Those who love David Lynch–and those who hate his movies–should find this list of David Lynch quotes, quotations, and sayings illuminating.

One thing is certain, David Lynch is no put-on. I can’t remember who said it about him, but one foreign producer described David Lynch as “an American original”. That might be what makes him stand out from the crowd is that David Lynch has his vision and he follows that vision without any compromise. It may not fit into any neat package for the promo people, but then, the promo people usually suck.

David Lynch on the Absurb

“The concept of absurdity is something I’m attracted to.”

“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 on Hats

“Hats–they’re great! I wore this real cool one constantly for six years–a ten gallon cowboy hat. I love Forties movies when everyone wore a hat. Now there are no more hats, and that’s a real shame.”

David Lynch on Insects

“A National Geographic photo of a garden is just the most beautiful thing. But there are a lot of things attacking a garden. There’s a lot of slaughter and death, worms and grubs. A lot of stuff going on. It’s a torment.”

David Lynch on Machinery

“I love to look at factories and turbines and things.”

David Lynch on Cooking

“I don’t allow cooking in my house. The smell. The smell of cooking – when you have drawings, or even writings – that smell would go all over my work. So I eat things that you don’t have to light a fire for. Or else I order a pizza. The speed at which I eat it, it doesn’t smell up the place too bad. The smell doesn’t last too long.”

David Lynch on Coffee

“A beautiful addiction.”

David Lynch on Cows

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

David Lynch on Bodybags

“The bags had a big zipper, and they’d open the zipper and shoot water into the bags with big hoses. With the zipper open and the bags sagging on the pegs, it looked like these big smiles. I called them the smiling bags of death.”

David Lynch on Sex

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

David Lynch on Actors

“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.”

David Lynch on The World

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

David Lynch on New York City

“I grew up in a perfect world, other things were a contrast. When I visited Brooklyn as a little kid, it scared the hell out of me. In the subway, I remember a wind from the approaching train, then a smell and sound. I had a taste of horror every time I went to New York.”

David Lynch on Philadelphia

“I had my first thrilling thought in Philadelphia.”

“[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 Philadelphia…I just have to think of Philadelphia now, and I get ideas, I hear the wind, and I’m off into the darkness somewhere.”

“We lived cheap, but the city was full of fear. A kid was shot to death down the street, and the chalk marks around where he’d lain stayed on the sidewalk for five days. We were robbed twice, had windows shot out and a car stolen.”

“It all started for me in Philadelphia because it’s old enough, and it’s got enough things in the air to really work on itself. It’s decaying but it’s fantastically beautiful, filled with violence, hate and filth.”

David Lynch on the Outdoors

“I got the woods out of my system. Now I like cities. I still like the woods though.”

David Lynch on the Meaning of Life

“We’re all like detectives in life. There’s something at the end of the trail that we’re all looking for.”

David Lynch on Ideas

“The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you’re dead.”

David Lynch on Childhood

“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.”

David Lynch on His Own Aging

“Between 9 and 17 most of the time, and sometimes around six. When you’re six you can see down the street and you’re aware there may be another block, but the world is pretty much two blocks big.”

David Lynch on Death

“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 on Music

“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.”

“Well, music gives you an indication of the mood, again, and if you lock out and find things out upfront they can help you tremendously.”

“Every note of music has enough breath to carry you away and as a director, all you have to do is let the right wind blow at the right time.”

David Lynch on Television

“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.”

“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 on Filmmaking

“I really believe that even if you just have a little bit of money there are ways to get into that film and make it work without a compromise. It may take a long, long, long time, like in Eraserhead. We didn’t have the money but we had the time.”

David Lynch on Happy Endings

“Are we in the business of falling in love with stories? What if every movie had to have a positive message at the end? If we only put out pleasant films, nothing would really stop, except that people would stop going to the movies.”

David Lynch on Movie Genres

“I love Surrealism and I love Expressionism, but, I had never seen ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’ until after I had done Eraserhead”. Ideas are the thing, and they just come out in a certain way, based on what you love and what you’re feeling. Later on, you find out that you’re in some sort of school!”

David Lynch on His Influences

“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.”

“Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It’s the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time.”

David Lynch on Meaning in His Films

“I’m of the Western Union school. If you want to send a message, go to Western Union…you have to be free to think things up.

“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.”

“They come along, these ideas, and they hook themselves together, and the unifying thing is the euphoria they give you or the repulsion they give you…you have to just trust yourself.”

David Lynch on Duality

“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.”

David Lynch on Film Noir

“There’s a beguiling and magnetic mood. There’s so much darkness, and there’s so much room to dream. They’re mysteries, and there are people in trouble, and uneasiness.”  

David Lynch on Mysteries

“I love the process of going into mystery.”

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

“Secrets and mysteries provide a beautiful corridor where you can float out. The corridor expands and many, many wonderful things can happen.”

“To me a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something that’s unknown, it has a pull to it. For instance, if you were in a room and there was a doorway open and stairs going down and the light just fell away, you didn’t even see the bottom, where the stairs ended; you’d be very much tempted to go down there.”

David Lynch on His Own Oddness

“There’s always the danger that I’ll be forever labelled resolutely odd. Because these days there is no time for shading in people, and you’re put in a little box. I’m always put in the category of strange, which I find a little odd. I´m a little different from that, I think.”

Top 10 David Lynch

Those who want to read more about David Lynch should look at this “Top 10 David Lynch Movies” post. If you prefer to see the quieter, slice of life David Lynch, check out this post I linked to above from the David Lynch Coffee quote. Yes, David Lynch has his own official brand of coffee…and he sells it in stores and everything.