Igor Stravinsky Quotes

What force is more potent than love?

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

He was a six and a half foot scowl.
(on Rachmaninov)

I am an inventor of music.

Composition is selective improvisation.

A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

My childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell.

The profound meaning of music's essential aim ... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

Revolution means turning the wheel.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.

Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.
[Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990]

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.