Igor Stravinsky Quotes

86 quotes in 952 categories

• In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
• A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
• Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
• Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
• To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
• 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…
• What force is more potent than love?
• 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…
• 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…
• Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
• 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.
• Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
• 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…
• 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 plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot…
• I am an inventor of music.
• Just as appetite comes from eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning
• 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…
• It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

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