David Foster Quotations

I am uncompromising to the point of huge dissension in the studio. And it's served me very well. My theory and my philosophy is, 'Compromise breeds mediocrity.' Obviously, you have to pick your battles, and the more success an artist has, the more they want to be involved in their own career, which is not necessarily a good thing.

I'm probably wouldn't do anything differently if I had to do it again. Every little thing that happens to you, good and bad, becomes a little piece of the puzzle of who you become. Every successful person you read about - Warren Buffett, Bill Gates - they all say pretty much the same thing. 'Do what you love.' I know I did.

When I produce a record, I roll up my sleeves; I'm not one of those passive guys. I really get in there and make sure every note is measured. I tell the bass player, 'You have to play it like this,' or I tell the drummer, 'It's got to be like this.'

I think that most of my romance comes out in my music. And if you look at my track record of three ex-wives, maybe there's something to that.

Commerce and art are natural enemies. And also, the enemy of good is great. And the enemy of great is good, so there's this huge juggling that's going on all the time.

With Celine Dion, we were selling 25 million records a pop. 'Pop' stands for 'popular.' It means we're plugging into the masses.

There's plenty of people who can sing OK that make terrific records, and I love them from afar. But when I make a record, I need great voices. That's always my mandate.

I told Celine Dion not to record that 'Titanic' song. That's about as big as you can get. 'Flashdance?' I thought, 'Welder by day, disco dancer by night - who wants to see that?'

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

We spent the night at a parking lot until the next morning.

He's a lovable man. He opens up his heart and gives his heart to everyone.

I was an extra for The Village , so I've done this before. I'd like to be bumped up to a day-player part, but mostly I just do it because I enjoy it.

Look at all of your options through your employer.

Just keep a paper copy of what you filed.

I'm still sawing and cutting underhand and it seems to be getting better,

To bring in the people, you have to have something different. You might not come down because you say you don't like Irish music, for example, but if you come down and check it out, you could find the band is really terrific.

Blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We are who people think we are.

I don’t really mean what I’m saying.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

You get to decide what to worship.

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.

Try to let what is unfair teach you.

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

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

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.

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

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.

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

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

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

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,

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

There are a lot of people who are making $120,000 who could put $4,000 in for their spouse, but they don't do it, because they don't know any better.

To divert meaningful volumes of through-trucks from I-81 in Virginia, the upgraded rail line would need to handle six new trains per hour, not per day.

You get more bang for the buck expanding capacity with rail than by building more lanes. The Eisenhower Interstate System is now mature. We need similar vision for the 21st century. We don't just need more lanes of pavement. We need to ask how we?re going to move freight in this country. And the answer should include rail.

The section that failed was probably built around 1895. The design life of our structures is 50 years, so it's more than doubled its design life.

The summer concerts in Stone Park have been one of my passions.

Sometimes our technical specification is slightly ahead of the industry standard - therefore we like working with vendors who are flexible enough to invest in developing appropriate solutions. Their Adaptive EDGE Architecture is in line with our campus strategy.

That's what they wanted you to believe, anyway.

There will be no incentive for the second milestone, but failure to meet the deadline will result in a $50,000 per day liquidated damages assessment.

This market is massively undervalued, prompting utilities to burn more coal and creating further demand for allowances. Every day that this situation persists, there is increased pressure for the market to be squeezed upwards.

It's a topic that's not clear-cut, ... That episode explored the issue very nicely.

It's taking the animals several seconds to run around, so this replay could be sending that information back through several stages and rewarding a long sequence of actions. It's that long sequence that is new.

It's to provide an inexpensive night out on the town. The community coming together, that's really the reward for doing it for 17 years because it's not the pay.

The irony of his fame now really is that he was one of the least significant rulers.

I'm often asked why we are bringing it here. We do like to remind people that for decades, we have been the primary destination for visitors who are interested in Egypt and Egyptian things. We have a permanent exhibit featuring Egypt, and we always have special exhibits like this.

I'm taking it one day at a time and I guess that's all I can do.

If you don't have much in other deductions and thus your itemized deductions aren't much higher than your standard deduction, then it's not really helping that much.

In television, we're writing stories about people and people's lives and the decisions they make,

In that compressed time, the rat is replaying the entire track from where it currently is all the way back to the very beginning. This result suggests that the immediate experience is actually recapitulated several times. The processing going on outside of the original experience may be important for learning.

In my own personal experience, very few people want to pay the premiums to buy a private contract.

Cheney's appearance is especially galling a week after this administration refused to back up its own International Trade Commission ruling that China is dumping steel pipe products into the U.S., threatening the jobs of thousands of American steelworkers.

By the end of this year I hope things will really be back to normal.

You know that the final move was the right thing to do, so you can send that information back through the set of actions that were taken leading up to the final state.

The e-filing process has been growing every year.