Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
IGOR STRAVINSKYThe 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.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.
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 -
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.
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 -
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 -
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 -
The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
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 -
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Composers combine notes, that’s all.
IGOR STRAVINSKY