Music Quotes by Samuel Barber

I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't.

— Samuel Barber

I was 7 years old when I began composing. I began composing, improvising at the piano, the usual story.

— Samuel Barber

I can only say that I myself wrote always as I wished, without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible.

— Samuel Barber

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven't the faintest…

— Samuel Barber

I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that.

— Samuel Barber

I've had little success in intellectual circles. I'm not talked about in the 'New York Review of Books,' and I was never part of…

— Samuel Barber

As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a…

— Samuel Barber

I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go…

— Samuel Barber

I think that what's been holding composers back a great deal is that they feel they must have a new style every year. This,…

— Samuel Barber

He is a lyric poet . . . aloof from the swirling currents in which many of his colleagues are immersed.

— Samuel Barber

There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand.

— Samuel Barber

How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society,

— Samuel Barber