Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Igor Stravinsky

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

What force is more potent than love?

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

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

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.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore 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.

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

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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

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

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

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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.

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

I am an inventor of music.

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

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

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.

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

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.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Composition is selective improvisation.

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

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.

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

Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.

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

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.

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

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

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

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

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

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

Hurry? I have no time to hurry.

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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