David Lynch says he will ‘never retire,’ despite emphysema diagnosis

Filmmaker David Lynch has reassured his fans that he is not planning on retiring, despite revealing that he is suffering from a chronic lung disease.

Filmmaker David Lynch has reassured his fans that he is not planning on retiring, despite revealing that he is suffering from a chronic lung disease. The 78-year-old screenwriter and director, whose credits include “Twin Peaks,” “The Elephant Man” and “Blue Velvet,” told Sight and Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute (BFI), that he had been diagnosed with emphysema. “I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not… And now, because of Covid, it would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold,” he told the magazine, Reuters reported. After the article was published, Lynch took to social media on Monday to reassure his fans that he has no plans to quit the film industry. Addressing his followers as “ladies and gentlemen,” he wrote: “Yes, I have emphysema from my many years of smoking. “I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco - the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them - but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema.