Quotes by Igor Stravinsky

• The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
• Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
• My music is best understood by children and animals.
• Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
• The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
• A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
• 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.
• Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
• The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
• To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
• Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
• What force is more potent than love?
• What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
• Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
• 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.
• Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
• Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
• In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
• I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.
• 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.
• I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
• 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.
• I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
• I am an inventor of music.
• Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
• 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.
• Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
• A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
• Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.