David Foster Quotes

...Genuine pathological openness is about as seductive as Tourette's Syndrome.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

I wish you way more than luck.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

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

Try to let what is unfair teach you.

Mediocrity is contextual.

Stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

...loneliness is not a function of solitude.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.

The way I think about things and experience things is not particularly linear, and it's not orderly, and it's not pyramidical, and there are a lot of loops.

The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir.

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

We are who people think we are.

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

I don’t really mean what I’m saying.

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

The man who knows his limitations, has none.

The point of books is to combat loneliness.

The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.

I am not what you see and hear.