David Lynch (1946–2025) left behind a small but remarkable book about creativity and meditation.

Catching the Big Fish is such a great book. It consists of small stories about ideas, meditation, creativity, film making and other things in David Lynch’s film making life. The tone is wonderfully light. Condensed advice for the living. It is a massive source for inspirational quotes, and I just thumbed through to get to these.

Sometimes restrictions get the mind going. If you’ve tons and tons of money, you may relax and figure you can throw money at any problem that comes along. You don’t have to think so hard. But if you have limitations, sometimes, you com up with very creative, inexpensive ideas.

Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below. If you can expand the container you’re fishing in – your consciousness – you can catch bigger fish.

It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. The first fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It’s the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It’s the hopeful puzzle piece.

In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawn, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet”. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.

Read more on creativity, for example Nathalie Dixon, or Werner Herzog or other books.