A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
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
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.
Igor Stravinsky
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
Igor Stravinsky
I am an inventor of music.
Igor Stravinsky
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.
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 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
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Igor Stravinsky
It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
Igor Stravinsky
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Igor Stravinsky
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
Igor Stravinsky
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Igor Stravinsky
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
Igor Stravinsky
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor Stravinsky
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
Igor Stravinsky
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
Igor Stravinsky
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
Igor Stravinsky
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.
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
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.
Igor Stravinsky
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.
Igor Stravinsky
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
What force is more potent than love?
Igor Stravinsky
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.
Igor Stravinsky
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Type:
Composer
Date of Birth:
1882-06-05
Year of Death:
1971
Nationality:
Russian |
