Igor Stravinsky Quotes

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

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

When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.

The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.

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

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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'.

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

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

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.

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.

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

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

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

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 live neither in the past nor in the future. 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.

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.

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

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

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.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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

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

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

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

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

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

I am an inventor of music.

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

Composition is frozen improvisation.

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

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

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

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

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

Revolution means turning the wheel.