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
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.
If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in their lives make it through the day.
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 did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.
... 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.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.
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.