Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Igor Stravinsky - Page 2

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

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

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

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

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 understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

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.

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

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.

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.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

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.

Revolution means turning the wheel.

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

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

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'.

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.

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

Composition is frozen improvisation.

We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

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.

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

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.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

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

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.

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

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

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