Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Igor StravinskyThe trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
Igor StravinskyAn audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
Igor StravinskyWe have a duty towards music; namely to invent it. ...Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality; whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.
Igor StravinskyI 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.
Igor Stravinsky