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 STRAVINSKYMusic is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
-
-
My music is best understood by children and animals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Composers combine notes, that’s all.
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 -
To continue in one path is to go backward.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I am an inventor of music.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
What force is more potent than love?
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 -
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
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 -
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one’s conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren’t always right.
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 -
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
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 -
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 -
There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
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 -
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 -
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY