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'.

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

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

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

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.