Igor Stravinsky Quotes

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

» The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.

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

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

» The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

» My music is best understood by children and animals.

» A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

» I am an inventor of music.

» 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.

» 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.

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

» Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

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

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

» What force is more potent than love?

» I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

» A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

» Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

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

» I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

» The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

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

» 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.

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

» What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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

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

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

» I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

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

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