John Boyne Quotes

If something becomes old-fashioned, it was no good to start with. Think about it. Michelangelo is not old-fashioned.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

Good music will always be recognized in the end.

A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

And who cares, five years down the road, what most movies made or didn't make? If it's good, it stands up.

Great songs stand out wherever they're from.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Art is forever.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.

Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason. I prefer to focus on the future. There are a lot of new stories to be heard.

When you make music, and even if it's commercially successful, it doesn't mean that it's going to hold up. It takes time to sort of take stock of what you've done and whether it's got legs and whether it's going to really have a place.

What makes art in general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor repetition. In everyday life, you can tell the same joke thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called 'cliche.'

It's hard to judge literary merit.

A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people's legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I've never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don't think that I can.

Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.