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.

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.

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

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.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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

Consonance, says the dictionary, is the combination of several tones into a harmonic unit. Dissonance results from the deranging of this harmony by the addition of tones foreign to it. One must admit that all this is not clear. Ever since it appeared in our vocabulary, the word 'dissonance' has carried with it a certain odor of sinfulness. Let us light our lantern: in textbook language, dissonance is an element of transition, a complex or interval of tones that is not complete in itself and that must be resolved to the ear's satisfaction into a perfect consonance.

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

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.

What force is more potent than love?

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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.

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

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.

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

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

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.

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

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.

I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more 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 remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Composers combine notes, that's all.