Igor Stravinsky Quotes

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

What force is more potent than love?

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.

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

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

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

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.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

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.

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.

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

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 performance of performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.

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

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.

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

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.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

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.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

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

We 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.

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.

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

Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.

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

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

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

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

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.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.

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.

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

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.