A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKYMediocrity borrows, genius steals.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
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 -
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.
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 -
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
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 -
Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.
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 -
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
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 -
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 -
Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Revolution means turning the wheel.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The profound meaning of music’s essential aim, is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
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 -
To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.
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 -
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
IGOR STRAVINSKY