Igor Stravinsky famous quotes

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

#Artist #Pigs #Noses

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Music #Thinking #Bars

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

#Order #Flow #Structure

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Vocabulary #Light #Perfect

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Pride #Artistic #Talent

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Music #Doe #Stealing

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

#Tunes #Tuning #Harps

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Inspiring #Art #Architecture

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

#Love #Marriage #Order

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

#Music #Ducks #Effort

Composition is selective improvisation.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Improvisation #Composition

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

#Love #Essence #Succeed

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Men #Realizing #Domain

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Music #Past #Today

My music is best understood by children and animals.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Children #Animal #Music Is

Music is...the coordination between man and time.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Men #Coordination #Music Is

The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Church #Able #Ornaments

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

#Work #Inspiration #Justice

The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Inspiration #Men #Profound

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Sin #Undone #Forgiven

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Music #Appreciation #People

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

#Nature #Grandparent #Generations

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

#Music #Men #Order

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Relationship #Drama #Reading

What force is more potent than love?
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Love #Force

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Real #Thinking #Awareness

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

#Funny #Music #Witty

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Starting Over #Becoming #Principles

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Inspirational #Music #Opportunity

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

#Pulse #Beats #Rhythm

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Art #Reality #Self

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

#Elements #Chance #Fluctuation

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

#Real #Writing #Mass

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

#Pieces #Villa

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators....
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Real #Artist #Giving

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

#Want #Tricks

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Genius #Mediocrity #Stealing

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Talent #Born #Should

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Zoos #Animal #Royal

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

#Long #May #Kindles

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Dream #Inspiration #Artist

Revolution means turning the wheel.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Mean #Revolution #Wheels

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Pieces #Music Is #Comment

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

#Art #Joy #Needs

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Taste #Should #Pardon

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Art #Judging #Criticism

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

#Would Be #Needs #Music Is

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Fashion #Hot #Avant Garde

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

#Music Is #Powerless

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Hands #Creating #Given

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Music #Moving #Order

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Long #Age #Pressure

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Freedom #Constraints

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Music #Years #Challenges

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

#Greatness #Masterpiece

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Years #Twenties #Today

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

#Silence #Foolish #Possibility

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Haste

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

#Ducks #Enough

Composers combine notes, that's all.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Notes #Composer

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Memories #Live By

To continue in one path is to go backward.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Path

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

#Attention #May #Notes

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

#Inspiration #House #Architect

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Dream #Criticism #Rodents

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Inspirational #Life #Wisdom

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

#Romantic Love #Careers #Classic

Good composers don't borrow, they steal
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Stealing #Composer

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'.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Age #Negative #Different

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Sound #Forget #Forget It

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

#Eye #Waiting #Symbols

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Meaningful #Freedom #Self

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Artist #Simple #People

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

#Thinking #Scotch #Names

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

#Duty

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Confused #Imagination #Invention

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Art #Artist #Pigs

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

#Childhood #Waiting #Hell

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

#Music Is #Impulse #Succession

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.
-- Igor Stravinsky

#Self #Execution #Precision