David Foster Quotes

Whitney Houston was a laser beam ... She always gave me better than what I asked for in the studio

This is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

The really important kind of freedom involves...being able truly to care about other people...

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

Don't do what you're taught to do, do what you love to do.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

Don't be too precious about your craft... there's only 26 letters and 12 notes, and Shakespeare and Beethoven said it all better than any of us ever will

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.

An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you.

You get to decide what to worship.

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible.

Try to let what is unfair teach you.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.

Lightfoot's voice is such a part of the fabric of Canada, I know it almost as well as I know my own voice.

Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win.

We are who people think we are.

Ya' know, these days kids seem to be getting younger and younger.

It seems like the big difference between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love, with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

I don’t really mean what I’m saying.

There's an evolutionary imperative why we give a crap about our family and friends, and there's an evolutionary imperative why we don't give a crap about anybody else. If we loved all people indiscriminately, we couldn't function.

Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass.

A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

I've noticed that, while I can't help but respect and sort of envy the moral nerve of people who truly do not care what others think of them, people like this also make me nervous, and I tend to do my admiring from a safe distance.