David Foster Quotes

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I’m not crazy about.

Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

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

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

she committed suicide by putting her extremities down the garbage disposal-first one arm and then, kind of miraculously if you think about it, the other arm.

Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.

This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

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.

The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

People, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

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

The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell.

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

You get to decide what to worship.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.

Nothing brings you together like a common enemy.

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.

My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.

Every love story is a ghost story.

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