David Foster Quotes

My work is to reach people with ideas, hopes, dreams, encouragement, insight, and revelation. That's what an actor wants to do.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

I guess I'm just inspired to tell stories.

With non-fiction, there is the struggle to be accurate. With fiction, it is a bit different: the desire to let imagination take you to new places.

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

I try not to repeat a story. I try not to repeat an emotion. I want it to be all sort of new for the viewers and to challenge myself as a writer, so there's always pressure. What else can you come up with?

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the 'bad guys' were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with 'Don't Look Back.'

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

Call it vanity, call it arrogant presumption, call it what you wish, but I would grope for the nearest open grave if I had no newspaper to work for, no need to search for and sometimes find the winged word that just fits, no keen wonder over what each unfolding day may bring.

I've been trying to make a difference as an actor. I want to play characters that move people, have them look at their lives differently, or give them an escape.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

We must be able to inspire. That's my goal in acting.

When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.

'Sophie's Choice' is actually the reason I became an actress.

My main goal as a songwriter is to make something that inspires people. To write things about my life that people can relate to. Whether it's a whole record or just one song for someone, I hope it can do that for them. Knowing that I have the ability to do that is inspiring to me.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.