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 STRAVINSKYI wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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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 -
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 -
Composition is selective improvisation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
To continue in one path is to go backward.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
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 -
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
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 -
The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Composition is frozen improvisation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
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 -
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
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 -
The performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
IGOR STRAVINSKY