hello-zombie:

“One night, my younger brother and my father sat me down in a kind of dark living room. My brother is very responsible, as is my father. They had a little chat with me. It almost broke my heart, because they said I should get a job and forget Eraserhead.

Well, I did get a job: I delivered the Wall Street Journal, and I made fifty dollars a week. I would save up enough to shoot a scene and I eventually finished the whole thing. And I started mediatating. Jack Nance, the actor who played Henry, waited three years for me, holding this thought of Henry, keeping it alive. There’s a scene in which Jack’s character is on one side of a door, and it wasn’t until a year and a half later that we filmed him coming through the other side of the door.

There’s an expression: Keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole. If you keep your eye on the doughnut and your work, that’s all you can control. You can’t control any of what’s out there, outside yourself. But you can get inside and do the best you can do.”

—David Lynch, from his book Catching the Big Fish