DAVID FOSTER

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.

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?'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.

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

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.

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

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

Try to let what is unfair teach you.

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

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.