To continue in one path is to go backward.
IGOR STRAVINSKYA good composer does not imitate; he steals.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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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 -
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
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 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 -
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 -
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I am an inventor of music.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
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 -
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Composition is selective improvisation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Hurry? I have no time to hurry.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music’s exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
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 -
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 -
Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.
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 -
Revolution means turning the wheel.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
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In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
It’s one of nature’s way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
IGOR STRAVINSKY