Art & Creativity Quote by Virgil Thomson

Thomson’s line flatters musicians, but it also sneaks in a hard-earned bargain: life is unreliable; the work is the one honest partner you get to choose. Coming from a composer-critic who watched reputations rise and collapse, movements become fashions, and patrons attach strings, the claim isn’t naive. It’s a refusal to let the marketplace or biography be the final judge of a life in art.

The first sentence is almost provocatively categorical. “Never known” reads like a critic’s report, not a mystic’s promise: he’s appealing to observed experience, a small empirical shield against romantic myth. The second sentence tightens the screw. Thomson doesn’t deny “deceptions” - he expects them. That word carries adult bitterness: bad contracts, political tides, false friends, the ego-traps of careerism. He’s writing in the long shadow of two world wars and the churn of 20th-century modernism, when culture could feel both urgent and disposable.

Then comes the pivot: “music itself.” Not “the industry,” not “success,” not even “audiences.” The subtext is a hierarchy of loyalties. People fail; institutions fail; taste mutates. But the discipline of making music - the private, repeatable encounter with sound, structure, and time - offers a kind of non-negotiable meaning. “Not going to let you down” is almost domestic language, as if music is a steady friend. It’s consolation, yes, but also instruction: if you want durability, attach your identity to the practice, not the applause.