Igor Stravinsky Quotes - Page 3

Composers combine notes, that's all.

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 wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.

I live neither in the past nor in the future. 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.

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

To continue in one path is to go backward.

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.

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

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more 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.

It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

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.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

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.

I am an inventor of music.

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.

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.

When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.