Igor Stravinsky Quotes

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

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

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

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.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

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.

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.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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.

I am an inventor of music.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

My music is best understood by children and animals.

I love ballet and am more interested in it than in anything else. . . . For the only form of scenic art that sets itself, as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty, and nothing else, is ballet.

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

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

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

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

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

For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.

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

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

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.

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.

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

There is no beauty in Music itself, the beauty is within the listener

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

He was a six and a half foot scowl.
(on Rachmaninov)

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

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

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.

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

Composition is frozen improvisation.

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

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

What force is more potent than love?

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

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.

Composition is selective improvisation.

Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.
[Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990]

Revolution means turning the wheel.

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.

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

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.

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

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

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

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 perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.

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.

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'.

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.