Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.
IGOR STRAVINSKYA good composer does not imitate; he steals.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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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 -
I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
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 -
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 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 -
What force is more potent than love?
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
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 -
Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
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 -
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 -
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
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 -
Music is the coordination between man and time.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
IGOR STRAVINSKY