Igor Stravinsky Quotes

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

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.

— Igor Stravinsky

“My childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell.”

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

“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.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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.

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

“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

“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

“Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“I am an inventor of music.”

— Igor Stravinsky

“What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.”

— Igor Stravinsky

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

“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

“One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

“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

“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

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

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

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

“Composition is selective improvisation.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

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

— Igor Stravinsky

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

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

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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.”

— Igor Stravinsky

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

— Igor Stravinsky

“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

“Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.”

— Igor Stravinsky

“Composition is frozen improvisation.”

— Igor Stravinsky