David Duchovny Quotes

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

No one has ever understood anything better by assuming that there is no reason for why it is the way it is.

I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.

Samuel Beckett once said, "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." ...On the other hand, he SAID it.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there's no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Trump - the American people have spoken. He definitely touched a chord in this country. I don't think we as a country can ignore that. There are people in this country that felt their voices were not heard, and now I think everybody is listening.

The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?

Everything in the world is gloriously meaningless.

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Anything goes and nothing matters.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all ... I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!

I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

Of course there's a backlash. Of course. Look, half the country voted for Donald Trump. But I think one of the things that we try to do on Update is we try to hit him on the facts. If Hillary Clinton was President we would be making fun of her just as much. We're not trying to be right, we're not trying to be wrong, we're trying to be funny.

I don't think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. I wanted to do the opposite - to offer up a life whose meanings can only be perceived through a tangle of desires, confusions, and textural details.

Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.

It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy--a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

As much as I don't care about those things, I think it's human nature to not want to feel totally insignificant.

I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.