Best 85 quotes of Igor Stravinsky on MyQuotes

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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

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

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

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.

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

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

Composers combine notes, that's all.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

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

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

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.

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 sole domain in which man realizes the present.

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

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

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

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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

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.