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The David Lynch Quote Collection

David Lynch

Failure

"When you're down, when you've been kicked down in the street and then kicked a few more times until you're bleeding and your teeth are out, then you only have up to go. You get reborn again, and expectations aren't so great because they've taken you away. It's beautiful to be down there. It's so beautiful!"

"And the fact that it [FWWM] failed was good in a way. A failure can free a person. There's no more place to go down and you get more space to search for ideas. It really can be pretty beautiful."

"If you love a film, it's not so bad. With something like Dune, I knew the film was not the one I had wanted to make, so those bad reviews were like a double blow. But you know a failure can give you this freedom so that the next time you go out and are sort of healed, you have nowhere to go but up."

"...it doesn't bother a person so much if they really like the work that they've done. It's when you don't like what you've done and other people don't like it, that's when it's a double whammy, you know, then it's real bad. But when you're happy yourself with what you've done it's hard to get hurt so much."

"Like they say, nobody sets out to make a bad picture. And when you make a picture that's very successful but you don't that's not successful and you don't like it - both- that's a devastating thing. Devastating. What's amazing to me is how you can play tricks on your mind, or your mind can play tricks on you, and it keeps you from seeing what's really happening. I don't know. I really suffered a huge...you know, kind of...depression, and filmmaking was no longer fun at all. It was filled with fear and I questioned everything. All the great things you have with success, I felt the opposite in every category and it was bad news. You don't trust yourself. You don't trust anything. It's very bad."

"The good side of failure is you've got plenty of time to work."

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