A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.
— David Lynch
You don't need a special place to meditate. You can transcend anywhere in the world. The unified field is here, and there, and everywhere.
I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.
Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.
The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.
Building a set is like building a place, but it's a temporary place, because sets usually get torn down. Kind of unfortunate.
A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.
I think that commercials can really ruin a song. You know that the person sold the song for a good deal of money, and that was the tradeoff. But, music and picture can marry in a beautiful way, and the reverse also.
Happy accidents are real gifts, and they can open the door to a future that didn't even exist. It's kind of nice sometimes to set up something to encourage or allow happy accidents to happen.
I'm not a musician, but I play music. So it's a strange thing.
A lot of artists think they want anger. But a real, strong, bitter anger occupies the mind, leaving no room for creativity.
I have no problem getting financing. I have a problem catching ideas that I fall in love with for the next feature.
Life should be blissful, and blissful doesn't mean just a small happiness. It's huge. It is profound.
Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.
I believe in creative control. No matter what anyone makes, they should have control over it.
I didn't really grow up listening to blues, because I grew up in the Northwest. It wasn't really the center for blues.
I love Bob Dylan. Who doesn't? He tapped into some kind of vein and it keeps on keeping on. There's nobody like him. He's unique, and just... way out cool.
Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle.
The greatest thing my father left me was a love for cutting wood - my love for sawing, especially pine wood.
I thought when I started meditation that I was going to get real calm and peaceful and it's going to be over. It's not that way; it's so energetic. That's where all the energy and creativity is.
A filmmaker doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don't have to die to shoot a death scene.
Humor is very interesting to me. My films are not comedies, but there's comedy in them from time to time, absurdities, just like in real life.
I love super crispy, almost burned, snapping-crispy bacon.
Most of Hollywood is about making money - and I love money, but I don't make the films thinking about money.
A lot of music doesn't do one thing or another. It just doesn't do anything. Then there are those pieces of music that thrill your soul. It's such a wide range, and it's really interesting that we all love different things.
Music deals with time and timing. It's so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it's critical, so critical. And if it's not there, it not only feels wrong, but it ruins things.
Somehow, the French got this idea of the starving artist. Very romantic, except it's not so romantic for the starving artist.
I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories.
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.
I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.
I love the quality, feel and history of film. I love the pictures of the giant cameras and the way it was.
Transcendental meditation is an ancient mental technique that allows any human being to dive within, transcend and experience the source of everything. It's such a blessing for the human being because that eternal field is a field of unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy and peace.
I don't remember my dreams too much. I hardly have ever gotten ideas from nighttime dreams. But I love daydreaming and dream logic and the way dreams go.
I've always loved the electric guitar: to hold it and work it and hear what it does is unreal.
I don't paint the town red. But when I do go out, people always want to touch my hair. It happens every time.
What I really like is to be at home, working.
Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.
More and more people are seeing the films on computers - lousy sound, lousy picture - and they think they've seen the film, but they really haven't.
To make the script, you need ideas, and for me a lot of times, a final script is made up of many fragments of ideas that came at different times.
Sugar does make people happy, but then you fall off the edge after a few minutes, so I've really pretty much cut it out of my diet. Except for cupcakes. I like those.
Meditation is to dive all the way within, beyond thought, to the source of thought and pure consciousness. It enlarges the container, every time you transcend. When you come out, you come out refreshed, filled with energy and enthusiasm for life.
I love music, of course, and many, many, many genres. There are hardly any songs I would say that I hate. There's a couple, and I don't even know exactly why I don't like them.
I've loved music always, and my music fire was lit by Elvis Presley, really, and all that was happening back then.
Negativity is the enemy of creativity.
I think part of the reason ideas haven't come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It's experienced and then forgotten.
I was raised Presbyterian, but I'm not really going to church. I think the experience in meditation is pretty much where it's at for me.
You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
An artist makes a painting, and nobody bugs him or her about it. It's just you and your painting. To me, that's the way it should be with film as well.
Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.
Music as background to me becomes like a mosquito, an insect. In the studio we have big speakers, and to me that's the way music should be listened to. When I listen to music, I want to just listen to music.
