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

Igor Stravinsky

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

Flow Music Order Structure Time
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Goodness Himself Imitation Steal
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Artist Oneself Simplicity Truffle
The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Commission Oneself Trick
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Diamond Failure Knowledge Perfection World
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

Challenge Development Performance Threat
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Alone Essence Love Success
Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Essential Expression Music Nature
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Artist Music Myself Pieces
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

Ability Creation Humble Note True Worth
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

Belief Dangerous Oneself Right Sincere
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

Drama Live Music Reading Relationship
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

Clock Control Fly Instrument Journey Slow Time
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

Establishment Man Music Ourselves Purpose Time
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

End Music Principle Reason Start
Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Average Genius Steal

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

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

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Popular Authors

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