Life's Pleasures Quote by Virgil Thomson

There is a particular brand of artistic pragmatism hiding inside Thomson's joke: if precarity is inevitable, at least choose the version with better taste. The line snaps because it refuses the martyr mythology that clings to young artists. Starvation is not romantic here; it's a logistical problem, and Thomson treats it with the cool, dry arithmetic of someone determined to keep his dignity intact.

The intent is half confession, half sales pitch to himself and his circle. "Where the food is good" is literal (Paris, in Thomson's era, still carried the aura of culinary and cultural abundance) and coded: go where the ideas are richer, where the conversations happen, where your poverty buys you proximity to the real action. It's also a quietly ruthless admission about networks. He isn't chasing inspiration in the abstract; he's chasing a scene.

Subtextually, the quip performs the persona Thomson would later perfect: the American modernist who can stand next to European sophistication without begging for it. The humor works as self-defense and as status claim. If you can joke about deprivation, you can control it; if you can frame your struggle as a choice, you keep the power in the story.

Context matters: early-20th-century composers faced thin patronage, and Americans in particular felt the gravitational pull of Paris as a finishing school. Thomson turns that cultural pilgrimage into a one-liner that punctures piety and makes ambition sound like common sense.