A Life In Quotes: David Lynch

The visionary film-maker and prolific artist, purveyor of the dark, mysterious, abstract and unspoken, died aged 78

• David Lynch, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive director, dies aged 78
• David Lynch: the great American surrealist who made experimentalism mainstream

David Lynch, the enigmatic film-maker who revolutionized American cinema and television through his dark, surrealist vision, has died at the age of 78, less than a year after the lifelong smoker publicly revealed his struggles with emphysema.

Lynch forged an idiosyncratic career that bridged the experimental fringes and the mainstream. After a peripatetic, middle-class upbringing in the American mountain west, he studied painting and made several experimental short films before his cult-hit breakout, Eraserhead. His career – including the award-winning films Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive, as well as the landmark TV show Twin Peaks – earned him an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2019.

They’re like fish. If you get an idea that’s thrilling to you, put your attention on it and these other fish will swim into it. It’s like a bait. They’ll hook on to it and you’ll get more ideas. And you just pull them in.
— to the Guardian, 2018

It’s a feeling, more of an intuition. It’s the idea that you’ve fallen in love with, and you try to stay true to that. You see the way that cinema can say that idea, and it’s thrilling to you.
— to the Guardian, 2018

I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.
— to the Los Angeles Times, 1989

The big mystery is life as a human being … Life is filled with mysteries, just filled. Human beings, we’re like detectives. We like to think about these things, or I sure do, and we want answers. The secret is: the answers are there, and they also lie within. It’s all there for us. If we want to get it, we can get it.
— to the Guardian, 2024

Certain things are just so beautiful to me, and I don’t know why. Certain things make so much sense, and it’s hard to explain.
— to Chris Rodley for Lynch on Lynch, 1997

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. But I don’t just find humor in unhappiness – I find it extremely heroic the way people forge on despite the despair they often feel.
— to the Los Angeles Times, 1989

In a way failure is a beautiful thing, because when the dust settles there’s nowhere to go but up, and it’s a freedom. You can’t lose more, but you can gain.
— from Room to Dream, 2018