“All the 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.”

“The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids’ heads that it’s not very messy to kill somebody, and it doesn’t hurt that much. That’s a real sickness to me.”

“I don’t think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you’re dead.”

“When you’re an artist, you pick up on certain things that are in the air. You just feel it. You’re getting ideas, and then the ideas feed into a story, and the story takes shape.”

“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.”

“The beginning dictates the direction and you never know where you’re going to go… the mood is what you’re looking for, and somehow we always find it.”

“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’s like being jolted with electricity and knowledge at the same time.”

“I found the world completely and totally fantastic as a child. For me, back then, school was a crime against young people. It destroyed the seeds of liberty.”

“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.”

“Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be too.”

“There’s this beautiful ocean of bliss and consciousness that is able to be reached by any human being by diving within, which is really peaceful and harmonious. Peace is a real thing.”

“Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way they really are. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain.”

“Speaking in front of a large crowd is not pleasant. The first interview I ever did was in 1972, and I couldn’t speak. I only said, ‘I painted it black.’ That was my one sentence. And so I have improved.”

“It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It is better not to know so much about what things mean. The meaning is a very personal thing.”

“The ocean of solutions is within - enliven that. It’s a world of clues, a world of mystery, but the mystery can get solved. You can find a lot of answers for these things within.”

“Don’t worry about the darkness - turn on the light and the darkness automatically goes. Ramp up the light of unity within.”

“It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.”

“The sick reality about our over-dependence on language is that trying to live without it is like a blind and deaf man with no arms or legs trying to navigate a dark narrow cave, and the cave is full of tarantulas.”

“There is a plot. What would be the point of just a bunch of things? There’s a story, but the story can hold abstractions. I believe in story. I believe in characters.”

“Language is an evil thing, a very evil thing. And a force to be reckoned with.”

“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.”

“I love child things because there’s so much mystery 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.”

“I guess I got whacked hard in the mystery department when I was little. I found the world completely and totally fascinating then - it was like a dream.”

“There’s always fear of the unknown where there’s mystery. It’s possible to achieve a state where you realize the truth of life and fear disappears - and a lot of people have reached that state, but next to none of them are on Earth.”

“One change of attitude would change everything. If everyone realized that it could be a beautiful world and said, let’s not do these things anymore - let’s have fun.”

“There are so many clues and feelings in the world that it makes a mystery, and a mystery means there’s a puzzle to be solved. Once you think like that, you’re hooked on finding a meaning.”

“When you do something that works you have a happiness, but I don’t know if it’s a feeling of power. Power is a frightening thing, and that’s not what I’m interested in.”

“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.”

“What got me interested was the phrase ‘true happiness lies within.’ At first I thought it sounded kind of mean, because it doesn’t tell you where the ‘within’ is, or how to get there. But still it had a ring of truth.”

“I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve.”

“I liked to paint and I liked to draw. And I often thought, wrongly, that when you got to be an adult, you stopped painting and drawing and did something more serious.”

“Cinema is its own language. You can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. It’s a magical medium.”

“I like the saying ‘The world is as you are.’ And I think films are as you are. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back.”

“An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. That first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It’s a hopeful puzzle piece. You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you’ve got it, the rest will come in time.”

“Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.”

“Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they are like poison to the filmmaker or artist. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.”

“People have asked me why - if meditation is so great and gives you so much bliss - are my films so dark? There are many dark things flowing around in this world, and most films reflect the world in which we live.”

“Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don’t let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate.”

“It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments.”

“Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole.”

“I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.”

“We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream.”

“Fix your hearts or die.”