Quotes from Igor Stravinsky

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

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

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.

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.

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.

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

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

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

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.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

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

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.

He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

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.

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

What force is more potent than love?