David Foster
David Foster
David Walter Foster, OC, OBC, is a Canadian musician, record producer, composer, songwriter, and arranger. He has been a producer for musicians including Alice Cooper, Christina Aguilera, Andrea Bocelli, Toni Braxton, Michael Bublé, Chicago, Natalie Cole, The Corrs, Céline Dion, Jackie Evancho, Kenny G, Josh Groban, Whitney Houston, Jennifer Lopez, Kenny Rogers, Seal, Rod Stewart, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, and Westlife. Foster has won 16 Grammy Awards from 47 nominations. He is the chairman of Verve Records...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionMusic Producer
Date of Birth1 November 1949
CityVictoria, Canada
CountryCanada
Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.
Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.
The basic idea that the purpose of life is to be happy or is to experience the most favorable ratio of pleasure to suffering or productivity to work or gratification to sacrifice or any of that stuff, which, you know, a couple generations ago, to say that kind of stuff would have made you, you know, a freak - a freak and an Epicurean - and now seems to be so much - simply an unquestioned assumption of the culture that we don't really even talk about it anymore.
There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.
That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine...
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
... it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.
Not having a passport makes me very blasé about what appears in foreign periodicals since I know I'll never see it.