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
Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.
I love the way you love, but I hate the way I'm supposed to love you back.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.
The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
You have to understand, writing a novel gets very weird and invisible-friend-from-childhood-ish. Then you kill that thing, which was never really alive except in your imagination, and you're supposed to go buy groceries and talk to people at parties and stuff.
The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
And meteorologists have nothing to tell people in Philo, who know perfectly well that the real story is that to the west, between us and the Rockies, there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved like streams into rivers and jets at and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses.
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.
If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay