Igor Stravinsky Quotes

86 quotes in 952 categories

• Composers combine notes, that's all.
• Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
• Good composers don't borrow, they steal
• 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…
• We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
• All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.
• My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
• An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.
• Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
• We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.
• Music is...the coordination between man and time.
• My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
• 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…
• 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…
• All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.
• Hurry? I have no time to hurry.
• Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
• Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
• One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
• Revolution means turning the wheel.

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