Igor Stravinsky Quotes

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

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.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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

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

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.

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.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

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

What force is more potent than love?

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 coordination between man and time.

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

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

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

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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.

It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

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.

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.

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.

Composition is selective improvisation.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.

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

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.