Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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.
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?
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.
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
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.
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.
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.
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.
There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
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.
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
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.
A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
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 childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
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
All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.
The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
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.
The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.